Data center facilities people are finding themselves between a rock (growing need for computing) and a hard place (requirements to reduce costs, reduce power consumption and reduce heat production). Although the specifications of each piece of equipment out on the data center floor are available, they don’t have the time to calculate energy use on a moment by moment basis. Viridity Software has recognized this issue and is now offering EnergyCenter as a way to visualize the equipment out on the data center floor, the power consumption, heat production and a number of other really useful factors on a moment-by-moment basis.
I remember conversations at several Site Uptime Network meetings in which power and heat were major areas of discussion (The Site Uptime Network is a service of the Uptime Institute, a division of the 451 Group, a previous employer. So, I was very interested in hearing what Viridity had to say.
Arun Oberoi, President and CEO of Viridity, along with Patrick Kelly, Viridity’s VP of North American Sales, stopped by to talk about the company, EntergyCenter and show me a demonstration. We enjoyed a conversation about the impact of both virtualization (processing, network and storage) on data center design and usage. We also spoke about the potential impact of cloud computing.
The demonstration was very impressive. We were able to look at an operational data center, look into each of the systems out on the floor and see how system utilization, power consumption and heat generation were related. With this tool, it would be possible for the facilities to move virtual servers or encapsulated applications from a physical environment that consumed too much power to one or more systems having a different power usage profile when needed to reduce the overall power consumption of the data center.
If you are responsible for facilities management and power is an area of concern, seeing this demo is likely to be an exciting experience.
