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Compute More, Consume Less: Smart Policies Unleash Data Center Productivity

Dr. Albert Esser, vice president of power and data center infrastructure solutions at Dell, discusses how changing your mindset can help meet compute demand for years to come. By setting operational policies around virtualization, regular hardware refreshes, and best-practices data center design, IT leaders can help improve productivity and lower power consumption – enabling much more useful work to be performed within facilities that are already in place.

Blades Shift Broker into High Gear

Dell™ PowerEdge™ blade servers help PT Ciptadana Capital support future expansion of its security trading service while reducing energy use, simplifying management, and optimizing limited data center space.

Enhancing Energy Efficiency with Dell PowerEdge 4220 Rack Design

As energy costs rise and green IT initiatives become increasingly widespread, reducing power consumption in data centers has become a key focus for many organizations. Rapid increases in processor and server density, meanwhile, only magnify the need to control costs. Many of these organizations are optimizing their power consumption by transitioning to renewable energy sources, installing cabinet-level cooling technologies, or arranging system configurations in hot and cold aisles. However, because the cost of cooling often matches or exceeds the cost of system power, organizations that focus instead on reducing system-level power can simultaneously reduce cooling requirements and compound their energy savings. The Dell / PAN System combines PAN Manager Software by Egenera for Dell with efficient Dell PowerEdge 1950 III rack servers and PowerEdge M600 blade servers configured with low-voltage dual-core and quad-core Intel Xeon processors. The Egenera Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture used by the system creates flexible shared pools of processing resources using a high-performance fabric that connects servers and controllers within a single chassis. Together, this fabric and PAN Manager switching protocols constitute an I/O virtualization layer that helps significantly reduce the number of required peripheral interface devices while also helping reduce associated server power consumption across production, development, testing, and high-availability systems. By supporting a comprehensive approach to reducing power consumption—including energy efficiency enhancements, server consolidation through virtualization, and the reliable dynamic data center—and leveraging the advanced infrastructure orchestration capabilities of PAN Manager, the Dell / PAN System can help organizations eliminate unnecessary equipment, optimize use of available resources, and automatically power down unused or underused servers to help meet the power and cooling challenges presented by rising energy costs and increasing equipment density.

Compute More, Consume Less: Smart Policies Unleash Data Center Productivity

Standard measures of data center efficiency focus exclusively on how a computing infrastructure uses the power flowing into it. Given that many data centers are reaching the limits of their power and cooling capabilities, these are important metrics. However, a second and equally important consideration can also affect the balance sheets: server utilization. To unlock the true potential of the data center, enterprises must shift their focus from power consumption patterns to the overall productivity of their IT environments. In this interview, Dr. Albert Esser, vice president of power and data center infrastructure solutions at Dell, discusses several key topics related to overall data center effectiveness, why utilization is so important to data center productivity, and how organizations can dramatically improve their data center productivity while still staying within the boundaries of limited power supplies. For example, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE)—the industry-standard metrics commonly used to measure data center effectiveness—can be misleading, because they are not designed to capture actual productive work being performed. A new metric proposed by Dell, data center performance per watt, captures not only power efficiency, but also the effectiveness of computing resources in doing actual work. Similarly, the metric of data center IT utilization captures how effectively a data center takes advantage of compute power already in place. These metrics can help identify ways to improve infrastructure efficiency and increase IT productivity. Following key best practices—including optimizing data center temperature, utilizing best-practices data center design, and optimizing utilization through virtualization and regular hardware refreshes—can help organizations increase data center productivity and reduce power consumption to meet compute demand for years to come.

Enhancing Energy Efficiency with PAN Manager Software by Egenera for Dell

The combination of powerful multi-core processors and virtualization has enabled significant increases in data center efficiency, supporting server consolidation and increased hardware utilization while still maintaining high performance. To evaluate new six-core Intel Xeon processors in virtualized environments, in September 2008 the Dell Enterprise Technology Center (Dell TechCenter) team ran tests comparing performance and power consumption on three server configurations running the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtualization platform at 80 percent processor utilization: a Dell PowerEdge R900 server with six-core Intel Xeon processors, the same server with quad-core Intel Xeon processors, and an HP ProLiant DL585 G2 server with quad-core AMD Opteron processors. Virtualized server performance can be measured in two components: sizing or capacity, which indicates the number of VMs that a server can support, and the aggregate performance that those VMs can achieve. In addition to performance, however, organizations should also consider power consumption when evaluating a server. Power consumption depends on multiple factors, including amount of RAM, number of PCI adapters, number of internal disks, and load level. In the Dell TechCenter tests, the Dell PowerEdge R900 with six-core Intel Xeon processors offered up to a 27 percent performance advantage over the HP ProLiant DL585 G2 with quad-core AMD Opteron processors and up to a 6 percent advantage in performance per watt. In addition, simply upgrading to six-core processors in the PowerEdge R900 increased its performance by approximately 18 percent while decreasing power consumption by approximately 11 percent—providing up to a 32 percent increase in performance per watt. These results can provide an idea of the potential performance and efficiency advantages these six-core processors can offer in Hyper-V virtualized environments.

Cost-Effective and Efficient Virtualization

Tora Trading Services is the recognized leader in electronic trading systems and liquidity access for Asia. Its TORA Compass trading platform is used by clients across Asia, the United States, and Europe, and accounts for more than 25 percent of the electronic trading flow on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Such demanding work and high availability require an efficient, scalable, and robust IT infrastructure. However, the company’s existing data centers could not meet these requirements because they depended on 1U and 2U servers that consumed significant power and management resources. This case study describes how Tora worked with Dell Infrastructure Consulting Services to migrate its trading application to three Dell PowerEdge M1000e modular blade enclosures housing 33 PowerEdge M600 blade servers. These energy-efficient blade servers immediately reduced energy use by 30 percent, while design features such as high-flow/low-power fans, an ultra-efficient power supply, and optimized airflow help ensure Tora can operate the blades within a specified power envelope. Simplified systems management features in these blade servers, such as the built-in Chassis Management Controller and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC), enable Tora to deploy new server resources quickly and efficiently—helping reduce the time required for initial setup by up to 90 percent as well as reducing time required for common tasks such as performing remote shutdowns, taking power readings, and performing hardware configuration. Tora has also benefited from the density of the blade servers compared with 1U servers, reducing space requirements by 35 percent. These enable Tora to get the most out of its data center space in a cost-effective way—and the company is confident that its clients are benefiting from the most reliable and efficient technology available today.

Blades Give Trading Application an Edge

Many enterprises today are running multiple operating systems in their data centers, challenging IT administrators to manage disparate systems while simultaneously working to make the most of IT investments as energy costs continue to rise. Data center hardware is often underutilized, and administrators are overburdened with the task of maintaining various operating systems on tight budgets. Administrators need solutions that allow them to adapt to changing business needs and manage systems effectively. As a result of a joint effort between Dell and the interoperability partnership of Microsoft and Novell, enterprises can implement comprehensive virtualization solutions based on Dell PowerEdge servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtualization and the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 OS. Dell PowerEdge servers utilize multi-core processors designed to create scalable and efficient hardware platforms for virtualization solutions. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 work together seamlessly through application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable communication and assistance for key I/O paths between operating systems. Together, Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on Dell PowerEdge servers offer a powerful virtualization solution designed to reduce the cost and complexity of managing heterogeneous environments while supporting flexible and robust interoperability, savings on hardware and energy costs, enhanced responsiveness and performance, and world-class combined support from Dell, Microsoft, and Novell.

Box Office Gold

Dell™ PowerEdge™ M1000e modular blade enclosures helped Soho VFX deliver a Hollywood blockbuster on deadline—more than doubling the company’s processing capacity while helping reduce power consumption by 20 percent.

High-Performance Supply Chain

Dell™ PowerEdge™ M1000e modular blade enclosures connected to a Dell/EMC CX3-20 storage area network helped supply chain provider YCH Group reduce data center floor space by 70 percent and power consumption by up to 45 percent compared with the previous solution.

Using QLogic 2500 Series Adapters to Optimize and Secure IT Infrastructures

QLogic® 2500 Series 8 Gbps Fibre Channel host bus adapters are optimized for next-generation data centers built on multiprocessor, multi-core Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers, including support for virtualization; dynamic power management; high levels of reliability, availability, and serviceability; flexible, powerful security; and simplified deployment.

Enhanced Power Monitoring for Dell PowerEdge Servers

The enhanced power monitoring and management features available in supported Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers enable IT administrators to easily track and manage energy use through tools such as the Dell OpenManage™ suite—ultimately helping optimize server power consumption and control operational costs in their data centers.

The Energy Smart Data Center

Going green can be the secret to significant cost savings as well as aggressive performance growth. Dell offers a comprehensive strategy that includes virtualization and consolidation onto energy-efficient systems, best practices for power and cooling optimization, and expert services that can help businesses achieve immediate benefits.

Best Practices for Unlocking Your Hidden Data Center

Dr. Albert Esser, vice president of data center infrastructure at Dell, shares his perspective on the momentum that is building behind green data center design. Plus: How IT organizations can put unused capacity to work and leverage tactics for fast, flexible growth that helps maximize the bottom line.

The Green Grid: Enabling the Energy-Efficient Data Center

An efficient data center can enhance business performance and help lower costs. The Green Grid—an international consortium dedicated to improving energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems—is developing platform-neutral standards, metrics, measurement methods, processes, and technologies that promise to help conserve energy for sustainable growth.

Online Supplemental Content for The Green Grid: Enabling the Energy-Efficient Data Center

Increasing Energy Efficiency with Dell/EMC CX3 Storage

Enterprises must consider multiple variables when designing an efficient storage environment, including performance, power and cooling requirements, and energy costs. Energy-efficient technologies in Dell/EMC CX3 series storage are designed to help enterprises optimize application performance while reducing energy use and controlling ongoing operational costs.

Managing Energy Use with Dell Client Manager from Altiris

Configuring and maintaining power settings for client systems can be a critical part of enterprise efforts to manage energy usage. For organizations built on Dell™ desktops, notebooks, and workstations, Dell Client Manager™ software from Altiris provides a simple, effective way to manage power schemes and other settings to help reduce power consumption and energy costs.

A Systems-Level Approach to Efficient Data Center Design

The increasing need for high-performance, rack-dense servers has strained the limits of many data center cooling systems. Dell-Liebert Energy Smart Solutions can help organizations overcome these limits, enabling them to increase performance while maintaining existing levels of energy use or to provide sufficient cooling for a maximum-performance infrastructure.

Reducing Power Costs by Migrating Legacy Servers to a Virtualized Dell PowerEdge 2950

Virtualizing legacy servers nearing the end of their life cycle can help reduce power costs while maintaining similar levels of performance. Recent Dell tests show that migrating legacy servers to a virtualized Dell™ PowerEdge™ 2950 can help reduce average power use by approximately 2 kW, potentially saving more than US$6,000 over a three-year period.

Understanding the Challenges of Delivering Cost-Effective, High-Efficiency Power Supplies

It’s no small matter. Power supplies can account for as much as one-fifth of the wasted power in data center servers. By emphasizing energy-efficient power supply design, Dell is addressing a key factor that can help reduce overall power and cooling requirements and contribute to lower total cost of ownership.

Power and Cooling 360

As we discovered when we began researching our special feature section on powering and cooling, IT planners would do well to consider a 360-degree perspective on data center efficiency. For this issue, we reached out to our Austin Design Center to gain insight into Dell’s recent in-depth research on power consumption in a typical data center.

Data Center Efficiency in the Scalable Enterprise

Energy efficiency is a top concern as IT managers struggle with rising power bills, cooling problems, usage limits imposed by local utilities, or requirements to deploy additional servers without expanding an existing data center or building a new one. To address energy efficiency effectively, data center managers must look at a variety of issues ranging in scope from the smallest piece of silicon to the entire data center.

Managing Data Center Power and Cooling with AMD Opteron Processors and AMD PowerNow! Technology

Avoiding unnecessary energy use in enterprise data centers can be critical for success. This article discusses the power and cooling advantages of AMD™ Opteron™ processors and AMD PowerNow!™ technology with Optimized Power Management, which are available in Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers.

Efficient Power Management on Dell PowerEdge Servers with AMD Opteron Processors

Efficient power management enables enterprises to help reduce overall IT costs by avoiding unnecessary energy use. This article describes how to enable and validate AMD PowerNow!™ power management technology on Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers with AMD™ Opteron™ processors.

Online Supplemental Content

Higher Performance for Less Power

The efficient power usage and heat output of Dell™ PowerEdge™ Energy Smart 1950 servers helped Deutsche Rentenversicherung reduce energy bills and avoid a potentially costly upgrade to its existing infrastructure.

Enhancing Energy Efficiency with Dell PowerEdge 4220 Rack Design

Taking advantage of the advanced features of the new Dell™ PowerEdge™ 4220 rack enclosure and following best practices can help IT organizations enhance hardware utilization, increase power and cooling efficiency, and reduce the server footprint in their data centers.

Data Center Workhorses: New Dell PowerEdge Rack and Blade Servers

In enterprise IT environments, success often depends not only on maximizing performance, but also on controlling costs by reducing power consumption, cooling requirements, and administrative complexity. To help meet these needs, the new 11th-generation Dell™ PowerEdge™ R610, PowerEdge R710, and PowerEdge T610 rack-mountable servers and PowerEdge M610 and PowerEdge M710 blade servers are designed from the ground up for high performance, energy efficiency, and simplified management. A flexible design provides a variety of options for internal storage and I/O expansion and incorporates the latest advances in multi-core processor performance, power and cooling, systems management, and usability. Key enhancements in 11th-generation PowerEdge R610, PowerEdge R710, and PowerEdge T610 servers range from new dual- and quad-core Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processors with QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology, high-speed PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 I/O interconnects, and embedded Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet network controllers to flexible chassis options, efficient Dell Energy Smart power supply units (PSUs), and intelligent cooling. Support for double data rate 3 (DDR3) memory provides a high-performance interface capable of low-latency response and high throughput, while support for 2.5- or 3.5-inch hard drives, optical drives, and tape drives helps maximize storage flexibility. Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) offer powerful, versatile security to help protect enterprise data. In addition, a breakthrough systems management design based on the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 6 (iDRAC 6) and other features incorporates advanced power management, system monitoring, hardware configuration, deployment, and updates. These enhancements can provide a variety of benefits in enterprise IT environments—helping simplify management, control power and cooling requirements, optimize hardware resources, and reduce total cost of ownership for organizations of all sizes. Also covered: Enhanced features in PowerEdge M610 and PowerEdge M710 blade servers to support high performance and energy efficiency.

The Efficient Enterprise: Boosting Your Data Center IQ

Weathering a tough economic climate means putting a hard stop on wasteful spending. At times like this, it is essential for IT executives to work proactively with business strategists to devise innovative ways to get the job done while consuming as few resources as possible, through measures such as enhanced energy efficiency, increased server and storage virtualization, smart systems management, and an intensified focus on smooth integration and scalability.Dell servers, storage, and management systems can help IT organizations meet today’s economic challenges while supporting fast, seamless growth. New 11th-generation Dell PowerEdge rack, tower, and blade servers feature the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, Double Data Rate 3 (DDR3) memory, and a high-performance, energy-efficient architecture designed for virtualization and easy customization—helping simplify management while helping reduce total cost of ownership. Dell EqualLogic PS6000 series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays are designed for energy efficiency as well, and include a virtualized scale-out architecture and a rich set of software features. And Dell systems management tools such as the Dell Management Console powered by Altiris from Symantec as well as the Unified Server Congurator enabled by the Lifecycle Controller help streamline and simplify IT management. Dell Services can help further support business growth through a customized, modular approach.Many business visionaries recognize that the biggest long-term savings may come from strategic capital investments that advance data center efficiency and intelligence—particularly cost-efficient deployments of blade servers and iSCSI storage—as well as best practices for energy management and IT simplification. By increasing overall efficiency and scalability, IT executives can keep pace with ever-changing business requirements while continuing to innovate essential systems and services that give their organizations the competitive edge.

Optimizing the Data Center: New Dell Servers and the Dell Energy Smart Architecture

Limitations on space, power, and cooling capacity combined with rising energy costs present enormous challenges for IT environments—but overcoming these problems should not require reworking the entire IT infrastructure or relying on expensive consultants. Dell™ Energy Smart technologies span a comprehensive range of Dell hardware, software, and services to help organizations dynamically balance actual work performed against energy efficiency, helping optimize performance per watt and reduce total cost of ownership.Integrated into 11th-generation Dell PowerEdge™ servers, these technologies focus on four key tenets—design, measurement, control, and reporting—to dynamically manage system performance, power, and thermals at the platform level. Energy Smart power supply units (PSUs) are designed to provide higher efficiency than the PSUs of previous-generation PowerEdge servers. Energy Smart system design incorporates multiple enhancements to help lower overall power consumption and optimize performance per watt. The Dell Active Power Controller (DAPC), an OS-independent processor power manager, can lower system-level power draw at times of low utilization to help reduce power consumption. Energy Smart power management features help significantly enhance data center efficiency. And the advanced Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series and Double Data Rate 3 (DDR3) memory components are designed for high efficiency.The Dell Energy Smart architecture in 11th-generation Dell PowerEdge servers can provide significant improvements in performance per watt and total cost of ownership compared with previous-generation PowerEdge servers. For example, in Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) SPECpower benchmark tests performed by Dell engineers in March 2009, a PowerEdge R710 server used less power at comparable performance levels while reaching higher maximum performance levels than a previous-generation PowerEdge 2950 III server. As performance requirements continue to increase, the Dell Energy Smart architecture can help create scalable, energy-efficient infrastructures to support ongoing growth.

Dell Delivers Performance and Energy Efficiency over HP and IBM Blade Servers

When evaluating a server, performance and power consumption are two key factors that organizations should take into account. Perhaps most important, however, is the efficiency with which the server can translate energy into useful work performed in the data center—a factor captured by the key metric of performance per watt. Maximizing performance per watt can lead to significant improvements in IT productivity without increasing power consumption.In January 2009, Principled Technologies performed Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) SPECjbb2005 tests commissioned by Dell to compare the performance and power consumption of three AMD Opteron™ processor–based blade servers running the Sun Solaris 10 OS: the Dell™ PowerEdge™ M905 blade server, HP ProLiant BL685c G5 blade server, and IBM® BladeCenter LS42 blade server. In these tests, the Dell server produced the highest peak performance of the three tested systems, providing 4.3 percent higher performance than the HP server and 5.5 percent higher performance than the IBM server. And because the Dell server also used the least amount of power of the three tested systems, it also delivered significantly higher performance per watt—37.6 percent higher than the HP server and 46.7 percent higher than the IBM server.Optimizing energy use can be critical to controlling operational costs in enterprise data centers. As these Principled Technologies tests demonstrate, Dell PowerEdge blade servers are designed to offer high performance while minimizing power consumption—providing the foundation of an effective and comprehensive strategy for data center efficiency.