Sustainable IT | Ted Samson » IBM aims at trimming electric bills with Active Energy Manager

November 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

IBM aims at trimming electric bills with Active Energy Manager

TAGS: Energy conservation, IBM

Management tools aimed at reining in datacenter energy waste -- and associated high costs -- continue to hit the market. The latest example comes from IBM in a software package called Systems Director Active Energy Manager (AEM).

Products such as AEM, as well as HP's Systems Insight Manager and Cassatt's Active Response, share similar features such as power capping. This function enables admins to reduce the amount of energy a given server consumes. The rationale is, servers -- particularly underutilized machines -- generally don't require as much juice as recommended out of the box. Thus, they end up using more electricity and generating more heat than necessary.

In addition to the power-capping capabilities, AEM lets admins monitor energy-usage trends to help in planning new workloads throughout the datacenter. That's of particular use to admins grappling with tight power budgets.

"Active Energy Manager gives clients a way to understand exactly how much power is being used in their data centers and where it is being consumed," said Rich Lechner, IBM's vice president for IT optimization, in a written statement. "Along with being able to cap the energy that powers these systems, this information can help save significant energy and cooling costs and create a greener datacenter environment."

Originally introduced in 2005 at PowerExecutive, AEM manages power usage across supported servers through functions such as power capping and a power-savings mode, which IBM says can potentially save datacenter operators as much as 30 percent of system power demand.

The power capping lets users set a maximum power level per system; power-savings mode lets users manage power usage as work activity shifts across various demands. This mode is enabled via an on/off switch, which can be scheduled during times of low utilization, IBM says. On supported machines, the function can be automated based on processor utilization. In addition, alerts and messages can be sent to higher-level systems management applications to automate the process.

In addition, AEM includes power-trending and thermal-trending features to monitor and report system energy usage as well as inlet and exhaust air temperatures for individual systems. "The offering allows finite and localized temperature adjustments within the IT shop to further reduce energy costs for cooling," according to IBM.

IBM says that AEM exploits iPDUs (intelligent power distribution units) to support older servers and low- and mid-range storage devices. By plugging these systems into a supported iPDU or a smart power strip, AEM collects power information and presents it in a centralized place, according to the company.

Originally developed for IBM's x86 System x hardware, AEM supports additional IBM's Power Systems and System Storage platforms. Big Blue plans to extend support to IBM System z mainframes. In addition, the company says "some hardware from other manufacturers is supported."

AEM also provides energy management data used by Tivoli enterprise solutions such as IBM Tivoli Monitoring and IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager.

IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager will be available for download beginning Dec. 7. Pricing will start at less than $100 per system and include both Power Savings Mode and Power Capping. iPDU capabilities, power trending, and thermal trending are free AEM features.

Posted by Ted Samson on November 6, 2007 02:44 PM

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