A key element of every data cen¬ter's physical infrastructure is power, which needs to be pro-vided continuously to the equipment to ensure uninterrupted services. Unfortu¬nately. this is easier said than done due'to many reasons. One of them is the dy¬namic nature of data centers today. Continuously, there's more equipment being added in data centers, which re¬quires the requisite power to scale up accordingly. So obviously. if you've deployed a large, monolithic power man¬agement solution which can't be scaled with the requirement, then you're in for trouble. What's required is a modular power distribution and backup system, which can scale up with the requirements.

Modular power units however, are not sufficient to cope up with the other key trends taking shape in data centers. For instance, power density per rack is also increasing in data centers thanks to the use of blade servers. Besides raising the power requirements, denser racks also lead to greater heat dissipation, thereby stretching the cooling system. The cooling system in turn also requires better power management to continu¬ously do its work. So once again, it indi¬rectly boils down to efficient power management and provisioning.

Another key trend that's related to data centers is IT infrastructure consoli¬dation. Increasingly, organizations are preferring a centralized IT infrastructure over a distributed one. This improves the manageability, reduces costs, and improves uptime of the IT infrastructure. At the same time however, it requires better power management, because you're in a way putting all your eggs in one basket. Power failure could have a drastic impact on your organization's business.



All these trends have nearly doubled the energy consumption of data centers over the past few years. In fact, as a thumb rule, half of the total energy consumed in a data center is by the IT equipment alone. Unlike other equipment, IT equip¬ment requires cleaner power and better monitoring becaue it's more prone to fail¬ure. So a combination of these factors is forcing IT departments globally to moni¬tor data center power consumption and find ways of increasing energy efficiency.

In this article, we'll not talk about the backup solutions like UPSes that can be used in data centers for cleaner power and backup. Enough has been written about them by us as well as other media in the past. It would suffice to say that you need a scala¬ble UPS sys¬tem, which can easily grow with your IT re¬quirements. So in this arti¬cle, we'll fo¬cus on other aspects of power moni¬toring and management, which starts from choosing the right IT equipmentitself, and then moves towards implementing solutions that can monitor and manage the power distribu¬tion to them. So let's start with the equipment.

Choice of IT equipment

Most IT vendors today are harping about providing energy efficient hardware, whether it's servers, storage, networking. or security. So before you can work out a proper power management strategy for your data center, you need to study the power consumption patterns of your ex¬isting equipment. Work out a strategy to gradually phase out all energy efficient equipment and replace with energy effi¬cient ones. For instance, multi-core processors have caused a revolutoin in the server space, by adding more compute capability within the same form factor. You no longer need to invest in a bigger server box if you want more power. So if you haven't already, you need to work out a strategy for replacing existing servers in your data center with multi-core ones. Next, work out similar strategies for other equipment, e.g. moving to Network At¬tached or centralized storage over direct storage, to get better power consumption per Terabyte.

Using power saving technologies comes next. Server virtualization fits the bill just fine, as it allows you to improve the utilization of your existing servers, thereby reducing the need to purchase more boxes. Once you've optimized the power con¬sumption of the equipment in your data center, you're ready to monitor its power usage.