• Sentry Software,
    The Only Way :

    • to Monitor the power consumption of all servers and storage devices
    • to Measure (in Watts) the actual energy savings
    • to Report (in kWh) the energy consumed server by server, device by device to charge-back energy costs to application owners
    • to Monitor the temperature in all servers to find the optimal temperature of the data center

Energy Cost Control

3. Efficiently Plan the Power Consumption

Reducing energy consumption, or at least stopping its growth, requires to implement a high-level project plan that includes an essential step, that is the capacity to measure, report and analyze the actual electricity consumption.

Plan Benchmark Measure Log & Report Implement
Perform data
center survey		 Determine
methodology		 Data
collection		 Facilities
data		 Develop action
plan
Research best
practices & ROI		 Install
instrumentation		 Environmental monitoring Infrastructure
data		 Set goal for
benchmark
Research potential
rebates		 Perform energy
utilization audit		 Analysis IT equipment
data		 Implement improvements
Get executive
managerial buy-in		 Calculate current
benchmark		   Environmental conditions Update
benchmark
Establish efficiency
team & goals		     Design and any
limitations		 Communicate

= Today’s practices
= Tomorrow’s solution required to reduce the energy footprint of your data center.

Data centers administrators need a technology that accurately and constantly monitor the equipment to report the electricity consumption of each server in kWh, even for servers that are not equipped with a power meter. Thus, selecting the proper software technology can be at least as important as choosing optimal hardware.

With BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management

BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management is a monitoring framework that features several modules specialized in the monitoring of specific IT components, like operating systems, databases, email servers, etc.

At the core level of BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management, there is a module that specializes in the monitoring of server hardware, storage devices, and switches. This solution, developed by Sentry Software and licensed by BMC Software, is available in two forms:

The main purpose of this module is to discover and monitor all of the hardware components of servers, disk arrays, tape libraries, fiber switches, etc. In addition, the product also reports the power consumption of each monitored system as a simple graph in Watts in the PATROL Console or BMC Portal. This graph shows the current instantaneous power drawn by a server.

The product also enables you to create an Energy Usage report based on data that has been collected every 2 minutes for several days. The report exposes the amount of energy used by the server on a daily basis. The graph is in kWh and by knowing the price of the kWh in your region, you can easily calculate the energy cost of the system.

By using other BMC reporting products, you can build reports for the entire server room, server by server, department by department and tell whose servers are the most expensive.

How Sentry Software Innovates

Few systems are equipped with an embedded power meter. When monitoring such a server, BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management will report the actual power consumption of the system based on the data collected through the instrumentation layer provided by the manufacturer.

Sentry Software uses an alternate method for systems that are not instrumented and do not have power meter sensors.  Since the hardware monitoring module already discovers all the physical parts of the system (fans, memory modules, processors, NICs, etc.) by knowing the typical power consumption of all these internal components, BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management is able to evaluate the power consumption of the system, based on its internal components and its activity. While it’s not an actual measure of the power consumption, it’s still a good estimation based on real data: what the server, disk array or switch is made of.

Get started now !

Get started now to reduce energy consumption of your IT : soon, the IT energy cost will be higher than the IT equipment cost.

Warm the data center Refresh the hardware Virtualize Avoid power-hungry systems Push quality over face price Charge-back application owners