Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

Power Assure, a developer of Dynamic Data Center Optimization software, stated that most CIOs and facilities managers only hold a high-level view of power and energy usage in their data centers. This assumption is about to change as recent studies indicated that power and cooling problems will be single biggest issue in data center topology in the coming years. In order to overcome it Power Assure has outlined best practices for data center power optimization.

Clemens Pfeiffer, founder and CTO of Power Assure, said that a considerable amount of power continues to be wasted in data centers, mostly by underutilized servers, and this growing demand threatens to exceed the total power available in many data centers, forcing costly expansion or infrastructure upgrades. For these reasons, CIOs and facility managers are now paying very close attention to power consumption throughout their data centers.

Managing power more effectively will reduce data center costs and extend its life. Using a DCIM solution, preferably with dynamic data center optimization capabilities to achieve the best results, will empower IT and facility managers with the actionable information needed to make optimal choices about equipment, its placement and its use.

Power Assure explained that there are three levels of best practices for monitoring and managing power utilization in the data center such as Establishing a Baseline - Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solutions support both the industry standard and popular proprietary protocols used to measure power consumption, so no special agents to install or no extra wires to run to measure power at the building, circuit and device-level.

Data center optimization best practices dynamically match server capacity with demand to create an energy proportional data center, in which facility and IT utilization and efficiencies are in synch. Instead of keeping the data centers in an ‘always-on’ operating state they should be kept in an ‘on-demand’ operating state to realize power optimization. This practice alone would help save up to 50 percent or more in power consumption as it improves the overall server utilization.

In other news, Power Assure was chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the GoingGreen Silicon Valley Top 100 winners.