Dynamic Power Capping + Thermal Logic = Power Savings

What’s the biggest infrastructure problem that most organizations face today? The answer might surprise you.

“Efficient power and cooling is the number one problem in the data center today, even ahead of availability and disaster recovery,” says Michelle Bailey, research vice president for IDC’s Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends. “That’s a big change. Just two years ago, it was just starting to become important.”

Moreover, Bailey says that many organizations are bumping up against power limits on expanding and adapting to key opportunities. The result? “Power and cooling used to be an IT problem, now it’s a business problem.”

Traditionally, IT managers have dealt with power and cooling problems by overprovisioning their servers rather than risk a blown circuit. (Overprovisioning is what happens when data center managers allocate energy and rack space to handle the maximum power used by a particular machine, commonly called the “face plate value,” rather than the power that the server actually requires.) Some even add a little extra over the faceplate value, “just in case,” resulting in even more wasted power.

The result? Many racks are half full and, even for companies that need to add more servers, the data center is out of power.

That’s where new technologies such as HP Thermal Logic can help. A portfolio of embedded technologies for an energy-efficient data center, Thermal Logic adds new energy savings to servers that are designed from the chip level through other components to conserve energy.

For example, the HP ProLiant BL460c G5 Server Blade has been given an energy efficiency overhaul. It now saves at least 44 more watts than HP’s first generation server blade. At the enclosure level, this equates to a savings of $2,220 over three years at .08/kwHr. Add new HP 2400W hot-plug power supplies for the HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure, and the result is more than 90 percent power efficiency. For even greater efficiency, half the power supply can go into standby mode to reduce power losses at low loads.

Bailey adds that the very nature of power and cooling headaches is changing. “Creating more space in the data center used to be the big problem. Now it’s a really big density problem. We know that density is going to increase. There’s no going back.”

Luckily, there are more tools to combat wasted power. “HP and other vendors are putting out new tools to address the problem of overprovisioning,” says Bailey. “They can provide more ‘headroom’ server capacity without overprovisioning, and that’s really important,” she adds.

For instance, HP Dynamic Power Capping, which monitors your real-time energy consumption of each server or enclosure and caps the energy that can be consumed, allows more servers to fit into each rack. Available exclusively from HP, it is already embedded in millions of popular HP ProLiant servers and is available through the Insight Control Environment suite of management software.

The savings can be quite dramatic. The Uptime Institute has calculated that, on average, businesses can reclaim $25,000 for every redundant kilowatt saved.

HP ProLiant server blades are energy efficient by design. Add dynamic power capping, and the potential to double the capacity of existing data centers doubles. With rack and tower HP ProLiant servers, it can triple.

The result? More IT in the same space–with servers running more efficiently–and costs being managed more effectively. So you’re better equipped to manage tomorrow’s data center changes and challenges.

Because one thing is certain: As IDC’s Bailey puts it, “The data center will evolve. The trick is to evolve with it.”

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» What could you do with the power of HP-UX 11i?

In its 25-year history, HP-UX 11i has garnered customers around the world. Here are just a few of them, along with the enviable business results they’ve achieved:

DIRECTV: This satellite TV programming provider launched a new Siebel CRM system on Integrity and HP-UX11i and realized less downtime (achieving 99.99 percent application availability), improved continuity and a projected savings of $100 million over a seven-year timeframe.

McKessonCorporation: The largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America upgraded from HP 9000 to HP Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i and realized a 50 percent saving on maintenance expenses and Oracle licensing costs.

Telefonica de España: This telecommunications company increased its business agility with the instant capacity features of HP Integrity with HP-UX. The firm also gained a 50 percent increase in performance and eliminated three years of maintenance costs on its existing systems, which equaled the cost of consolidating operations on the HP platform.

Taifook Securities Group Ltd LTD: This Hong Kong financial brokerage chose to upgrade to HP Integrity server and HP-UX, improving the performance of its core IT system functions by a factor of seven.