Real-Time Granularity Brings PUE into the C-Suite

A data center is both one of an enterprise’s primary assets, as well as one of its primary cost centers. With the increasing cost of energy, coupled with the huge demand placed on computing resources, operations, IT, and the executive team all have a stake in a deeper and clearer understanding of total cost of ownership to run an application. The Green IT movement provides additional impetus for maximizing efficiency. Throw in the complexity added by co-location, managed hosting, virtualization, and the cloud, and the demand for insight-driven efficiency is even stronger. Vendors in the data center management space are springing forward to address this demand.

Rackwise, a comprehensive data center information management (DCIM) company, has moved the needle forward, providing a higher level of granularity for real-time reporting on data-center assets, forging a new partnership with Intel Corp., in which Rackwise will embed Intel Data Center Manager (DCM) into its software.

About Rackwise

San Francisco-based Rackwise addresses multiple dimensions of the data center, including visualization, documentation, modeling, analysis, and management. Over time, the company has built models of 30,000 pieces of equipment, and its customer base includes such companies as FedEx, Chase, and Home Depot, according to Doug MacRae, Executive Vice President, Technology Development Group. Rackwise's product line covers four key areas: Data Center Essentials, Data Center Optimization, Data Center Intelligence, and Data Center Business.
Data Center Essentials is Rackwise's product foundation. It includes basic design and modeling functionality, and support for virtualization, cabling, asset management, and capacity planning.

Data Center Optimization locates servers with low CPU utilization, recognizes highly consumptive devices, and correlates those devices with the applications they support, providing grounds for determining ROI on equipment and decisions about whether to decommission that equipment.

Data Center Intelligence performs fault impact analysis, capacity planning, and historical reporting, as well as executive-level reports on power expenditures, operational, and capital costs.

Data Center Business performs cost and savings analysis, and allows enterprises to run chargeback programs on any user-defined metric, including space, power, and CPU utilization. Through graphics and dashboards, this feature also allows executives to assess the true costs of running business services in a given geography, or for particular hardware-software configurations, which means they can design business services to run optimally based on accurate information about their IT stack.

Rackwise continually enhances its offering through integration with other software such as Microsoft Visio, which allows customers to color-code heat rates, server loads, device types and locations, and visualizations of server racks from the enclosure level, down to the module level, MacRae says. Other partnerships include BMC Remedy and Atrium CMDB for change management and trouble ticketing, and, most recently, Intel DCM..

The Role and Benefits of Intel DCM

Rackwise previously offered real-time monitoring of equipment using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). But this first-generation capability still required a good deal of manual setup and verification, says MacRae. Rackwise turned to Intel to provide more automated provisioning and to take readings at the device level of each rack.

“What we’ve gained by plugging in the Intel DCM solution is a finer level of detail, more accurate, real-time information, and the ability to provision this interface in a much more robust fashion than we had before,” MacRae says. "It's also much faster."

Using Intel DCM’s auto-detect feature, Rackwise can accelerate onboarding of new devices as they are added to racks at its clients’ data centers, significantly reducing the amount of manual verification its clients will need to perform.

Intel DCM provides real-time indications of power consumption and temperature data—aggregated at the levels of rack, row, and room—as well as in user-defined logical groups, which Rackwise is incorporating into its Essentials offering, allowing operations managers to make off-the-cuff allocation decisions, says MacRae.

Rackwise can now deliver metrics such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) at practically any level of granularity, from device to rack to geographic region, which is something Rackwise’s clients demand. PUE is expressed as the amount of total facility power divided by the power consumed by the IT equipment. One aspect of this is closer monitoring of non-IT devices, which some clients have started to explore. The other is more fine-grained analysis of exactly how and where IT devices are wasting power, which is where Intel DCM comes in. While some vendors offer only PUE estimates based on the “plated” or manufacturer-estimated figures of a device, because it has embedded Intel DCM, Rackwise can offer actual real-time measurements of temperature at the inlets of individual devices.
“Over the last year, PUE has gone from casual interest at the executive level to a serious part of our discussions,” MacRae says.

Increasingly, enterprises are turning to managed hosting, co-location, and the cloud for running their applications, but they still want to know about the efficiency of their applications across the board. In the near future, Rackwise, which itself uses a software-as-a-service model, is looking to take this fine-grained functionality into multitenant environments, and to begin providing report cards on hosted as well as in-house environments, MacRae says.

Even now, he estimates that the pre-Intel Rackwise installations save most customers 10 to 20 percent.
“With Intel DCM, we’re expecting a pretty significant jump on that, which will translate into operational savings and the ability to get a more accurate level of ongoing reporting for the data centers,” MacRae says.

Conclusion
As the complexity and importance of data center operations increases in the eyes of those holding the financial strings at a company, there is tremendous opportunity for vendors to intervene and provide new levels of data-center visibility, control, and flexibility. Communicating technology decisions, in both broad-based and laser-sharp financial terms, is dependent on gathering accurate, real-time data on computing hardware, as close to the device level as possible. Through partnerships such as Intel DCM. and Rackwise, the C-suite’s conversations are increasingly extending from capital and operating expenses to more specific metrics, such as PUE. With a more immediate grasp of data center operations and their true costs in hand; the relationship between power and technology metrics and financial metrics is becoming much clearer, helping enterprises run more efficiently.

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