Controlling Your Power and Cooling Costs with Dell PowerEdge Servers

Executive Brief

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a QuinStreet Excutive Brief. 2012

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Controlling Your Power and Cooling Costs with Dell PowerEdge Servers

Todays powerful business-critical applications and the sheer amount of data created by businesses require organizations to invest in powerful servers that can handle the load. For many businesses, more powerful servers mean a higher electric bill as more energy is used to power and cool the data center. According to a study sponsored by The New York Times, total data center power consumption from servers, storage, communications, cooling and power distribution equipment accounted for between 1.7 percent and 2.2 percent of total electricity use in the United States in 2010. That sounds like a significant amount of power, and it is, but the other impressive finding in the survey is that the amount of power being devoted to data centers isnt growing as fast as the researchers originally expected. There are a number of ways that IT administrators are saving on power and cooling costs. They are increasingly adopting server virtualization to reduce the number of physical servers they need to run the business and increase the utilization rates they get from the physical servers they are running. They are also taking advantage of power management technologies that are both built into the server and included in the management software that help monitor and manage their infrastructure. Administrators are taking advantage of newer, more efficient servers with
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newer, more efficient power supplies that can help control power costs. There are also some IT administrators who are testing the traditional conventions of data center power and cooling by experimenting with running warmer data centers and alternative cooling techniques, as well as a renewed focus on airflow in the data center instead of temperatures.

There are four features of Dells 12th generation PowerEdge servers that make them more energy efficient when compared to previous generations. Together they help Dells newest PowerEdge servers deliver 47x greater performance per watt over servers the company featured just three generations ago.

Power-Efficient Components
Dells newest PowerEdge servers, the 12th generation of the PowerEdge line, are designed to improve efficiency in the data center by automating day-today tasks, enabling simple deployment and provisioning, making infrastructure management easier for administrators and by saving costs with a number of energy-efficient features. Dells 12th generation PowerEdge servers are available in rack, blade and tower form factors, and feature the latest Intel Xeon server processors. The 12th generation Dell PowerEdge servers are powered by the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family, which delivers energy-efficient performance without negatively impacting processor performance. The servers also take advantage of 1 Dells 12th generation PowerEdge servers are full of components that work together to create an energyefficient system.

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Controlling Your Power and Cooling Costs with Dell PowerEdge Servers

components like low-voltage memory; variable-speed fans that speed up and down depending on the load on the system; and low-power resistors to make energy efficiency a integral part of the new systems.

The 12th generation Dell PowerEdge servers introduce OpenManage Essentials, a hardware management console that can monitor and maintain server, storage and networking devices.
Manager enables administrators to monitor, report and control power consumption at the processor, memory and system level. It can aggregate monitoring and control across racks, aisles and data centers and permits policy-based power capping through an integrated management console. This greater visibility into data center power usage can help administrators facilitate increased rack server density where its possible; optimizes workload power consumption; and enables power-based dynamic workload placement or migration. The OpenManage Power Center can also cap usage in milliseconds when power or thermal events occur in the data center. Dells power supply efficiency has increased 16 percent in the 12th generation PoweEdge servers compared to the previous generation. Dell estimates the savings from its power supplies at $64 per server per year, and thats thanks to features that help Dell PSUs dynamically fit a customers power usage. Dell PSUs are designed to run at the highest possible efficiency, up to 94 In addition to generational energyefficiency improvements delivered by Dell 12th generation PowerEdge servers using Intel Xeon processors, Dell is working to create more efficient percent. A feature called Extended Power Range increases the overall system power budget by 15 percent by increasing the configurations that fit within a smaller power supply. machines that consume less power. Dell servers already offer very low energy consumption at idle as well as full workload. In fact, Dell servers have improved performance per watt by 31 times over the past five years. Dell offers different sized power supplies for its servers so customers can tailor their servers power requirements to the specific workloads that run on their machines.

Power Management
The 12th generation Dell PowerEdge servers introduce OpenManage Essentials, a hardware management console that can monitor and maintain server, storage and networking devices. It reduces the complexity of basic management tasks; is easy to install and maintain; and is optimized for use by IT generalists. Also new with 12th generation PowerEdge servers is Dells OpenManage PowerCenter, a part of OpenManage Essentials that delivers increased visibility and control of power consumption to administrators. They can use this information to improve rack density, decrease response times and make better overall decisions. The OpenManage PowerCenter is part of the Dell OpenManage Essentials management console. The OpenManage Power Center works with the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family to extract and present power and temperature information provided by Intel Node Manager technology in an easy-to-understand form. The combination of OpenManage Power Center and Intel Node

Power Supplies

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Controlling Your Power and Cooling Costs with Dell PowerEdge Servers

A feature called Hot Spare intelligently puts a redundant PSU into sleep state to match the efficiency advantage of a single PSU, but without losing its redundancy capability. In the event of a failure, a sleeping PSU will instantly wake up and support the system load.

years, this increased demand for processing power caused skyrocketing costs for data center power and cooling, but thanks to advances made by server vendors, the direst predictions for power and cooling costs are not being fulfilled. With its 12th generation PowerEdge

platform for the heavier application workloads being driven by businesses. They feature the Dell OpenManage Power Center, which helps administrators measure and monitor power consumption and increase their efficiency. Energy-efficient power supplies can help administrators right size their power consumption so it matches their infrastructure. Finally, validation for Dells Chiller-Less Fresh Air solution allows some Dell servers to run at higher temperatures and humidity levels to further decrease cooling costs.

Fresh Air Validation

Many IT administrators are exploring power and cooling solutions that take a new approach to industry standard temperatures and cooling. Dell is engineering its servers to operate at higher ambient air temperatures. The Dell Chiller-Less Fresh Air solution brings outside (chiller-less) air into the data center to support the cooling. This results in lower power consumption in the data center. Dell already added Fresh Air validation to select servers, switches and storage arrays, and will continue to support and expand the Fresh Air program with the 12th generation PowerEdge servers. According to Dell, the Fresh Air solution canaccrueup to$100,000 of operational savings per megawatt of IT and eliminate capital expenditures of approximately $3 million per MW of IT.

servers, Dell makes it easier for businesses to control and monitor their energy usage than ever before. Already energy efficient at idle and full workload, Dells newest PowerEdge servers are an excellent energy-efficient

Conclusion
Increased workloads and powerful applications are forcing businesses to demand more computing power from their data center. For the past several
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