Home » Raritan Blog
December 6, 2010
A recent article in The Datacenter Journal provides a quick overview of the new virtual CommandCenter Secure Gateway and sums up its benefits very nicely. Please check it out here.
One quick and minor correction: The evaluation version now enables access to sixteen nodes (e.g. servers, virtual machines, routers, PDU). The previous version supported access to only ten.
November 15, 2010
In Australia, the cost of electricity is rising by 10% year-on-year, an expense that can quickly translate to vast sums for large Australian enterprises. In 2009 Gartner found that energy costs would emerge as a company’s highest operating cost, second only to labour, in 70% of all data centre facilities worldwide.
With the cost of power rising dramatically and increased uncertainty about global power availability all levels of corporate management are more focused than ever on managing and conserving energy.
The saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is particularly true for power, where rule-of-thumb estimates can turn out to be just plain wrong, leading to unnecessary and sometimes substantial costs. Nowhere is this more critical than in the data centre, as typically data centres use on average 25% of the total energy consumed in a typical large organization.
Anthony Bonaventura
November 10, 2010
The federal government has hundreds of data centers that are full of network equipment, cooling apparatus, servers and storage appliances. These data centers account for approximately 10% of the total electricity used by all data centers in the United States. This equates to approximately $700 million in electricity costs per year - enough power to support over 600,000 average households in the United States for a year.
Given the fact that the estimates above are approximations, these figures boldly illustrate the enormous energy consumption in federal data centers and the need for powerful and effective energy management planning and strategies.
Executive Order 13514 “mandates that agencies implement best practices for energy efficient management of federal data centers and servers.” These best practices include metering and measuring IT equipment to determine cost savings derived from energy improvements in the data center. The installation of these metering and measurement tools coupled with a method to collect this data so a systems performance over time can be monitored for improvement or degradation is also a best practice.
Today, there are intelligent power distribution units for data center cabinets and software available to measure and collect the power consumption data for each individual piece of IT equipment and the environmental conditions occurring around that equipment inside of each rack or cabinet in the data center. These powerful products assist greatly in helping data center managers and facilities personnel maximize the finite amount of power they have coming into their data center.
October 25, 2010
Vendors in the IT and data center space are beginning to make their centralized management systems available as a virtual appliance, enabling them to run on leading virtualization platforms. This is the case with Raritan’s CommandCenter Secure Gateway (CC-SG). A new version will be released in November that can be deployed as a VMware virtual machine.
Running as a virtual machine (VM) – especially within a VMware environment that delivers several key features rich in flexibility and security, has several operational advantages over a proprietary hardware solution. For example, there is likely space and resources available in an established virtual environment on which the appliance can be installed. As a result, additional hardware expense is avoided. Also, with a virtual appliance, there is no extended hardware warranty to purchase.
Allen Yang
October 22, 2010
In late August 2010, I wrote on this blog last time that Raritan IT will use Power IQ and PX to monitor the incremental power consumption of the Cisco UCS, while we gradually migrate some physical rack-mount physical servers as VM onto UCS blades. The following results reflect our P2V migration activities between 2010-08-05 and 2010-10-20. We have 2 UCS chassis that we call UCS1 and UCS2, and both of them are installed on our Cisco Rack 4. During the time period from 08/05 to 10/20, we had the following physical activities:
From Power IQ data reading we have the following observations:
In summary, between 08/05 and 10/20, Raritan IT measured power saving of 20KWh a day with the activities of migrating 5 physical servers as VMs onto Cisco UCS blades and remove these physical servers from the racks. The daily power consumption of these observed systems combined dropped from slightly over 330KWh a day on 08/05 to slightly under 310 KWh a day on 10/20. The Power IQ trend diagram also portrays such gradual reduction, which very accurately reflects the activities conducted and the resulting effects on power consumption over the observed time period.
Power Consumption from Aug 5, 2010 to Oct 20, 2010
Raritan IT will continue its physical server migration activities in the next few months, there may be more interesting findings we can gather in the future; stay tuned.
(part of this blog entry is also posted in response to a comment for my late August blog post)