Technology with the Environment in Mind

  Section 4 of 11  

Dynamic Data Center Power Management: Trends, Issues, and Solutions

DYNAMIC POWER MANAGEMENT APPROACH

The fundamental problem with the current approaches just described is that they are not based on measurements of actual power consumption. The data center operator has no visibility into how much power each server (and hence the rack and room) is consuming at any given time, neither does he/she understand the power consumption pattern over time. Without that visibility, the operator (or data center management software) is unable to decide how much power to allocate to servers/racks based on actual need. A better approach is to allocate power and populate racks using the following steps:

1. Monitor actual power consumption to understand average and peak power utilization for the server/rack.
2. Dynamically allocate power to groups of servers to maximize power/space utilization while staying within the power constraints determined by the power and cooling capacities.
3. Dynamically reallocate power when necessary to accommodate shifts in power needs of servers.

To implement this dynamic power allocation approach, server platforms must address key power management requirements.

  Section 4 of 11  

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