Your data center is by far the largest energy consumer in your facility. Data centers grab a stunning 2% of the overall energy used in the U.S. today and are growing their usage the fastest (doubling within the next 5 years). Yet, most facilities do not measure  the total power going into the data center and virtually none measure the power on individual circuits and outlets. 

But wait! We’re here to tell you that this is EASY to do, and you don’t even have to disrupt power to your systems in order to do it!  If you have an ultra-modern Power Distribution Unit (PDU) you might already have network access to this information.  But even if you don’t (and we didn’t in any of our data centers), it is very straightforward to buy and install power-metering gear.  Essentially, you clip a “split core” ring onto each circuit wire at the PDU (there are a variety of different ways to do this). These hardware circuit-boards are very inexpensive and each can handle 80 or 100 or more circuits.  With this simple addition to your PDUs, we are now live monitoring 1,000 circuits in our main data center.

 And don’t stop there! Inside each rack, you probably have a long power strip (probably dual) that power all the servers and equipment, right? New versions of these strips can monitor each individual outlet.   

Once you have the monitoring gear in place, you can typically pull the data via SNMP over IP.  We at CA have recently enhanced our core monitoring software product to understand how to pull this new data and have built new applications for display and management. It is so important to first measure measure measure!!  Why make any changes if you don’t know where you are today?  And you certainly want to be able to show real data and report on performance improvements!!!

Chris J Stakutis
VP Emerging Technologies

Christopher.Stakutis@ca.com