The power rating on system faceplates doesn’t tell the whole story.
A real projection for a system considers that actual power requirements may ebb or spike with workloads and usage levels. Whether a customer is replacing systems, managing regulatory changes, or considering a consolidation project, it has become a business requirement to accurately forecast a data centre’s power and operational requirements.
HP provides several tools that work together in helping customers to make accurate projections of power needs.
HP Power Advisor is a tool which computes the estimated server power and cooling needs of the server. The tool factors in different server components and application loads to determine the electrical consumption and heat dissipation.
Features include:
- Approximate the server electrical and heat load for facilities planning.
- Interactive slide bar to vary software application load and compute for appropriate electrical and heat load.
- Analysis of server load to determine the required power supplies for redundant setup.
- Graphical representation of racks and servers and power and cooling estimation at the rack level.
- Cost of ownership calculator.
To compute estimated server power and cooling needs for Integrity systems based on the Intel 9100 series and earlier, Power Calculators are available at the HP Thermal Logic for Integrity website. The calculator factors in different server components and application loads to determine the electrical consumption and heat dissipation.
Values from the power calculators can be entered into Capacity Advisor, which will use these values to compute the power and energy needs of a target server at different times of day and under different loads.
A more accurate and easier to use power estimate results when combining Capacity Advisor with Insight Control power management. Capacity Advisor will get detailed power readings from ICpm, and then use least squares techniques to find the relationship between the use of the system and the power consumed.
Different applications have different power profiles as they run. The power calculators are calibrated with floating point intensive workloads that draw a lot of power. The goal is for the power calculators to reflect a conservative estimate of the power needs for the server. Together with Insight Control power management, Capacity Advisor can estimate the power that will be used by the specific application being run on the server.
Once the relationship between system use and power is established from historical data, Capacity Advisor can use that to predict power needs in the future. This prediction takes into account the forecasted growth rate of the workloads, and will take into account planned configuration changes such as stacking more workloads or virtual machines on the server.
When considering upgrading to different servers, Capacity Advisor can compare how much electricity each server will use per month. This allows energy costs to be considered in purchasing decisions.
