Infrastructure Tool Manages Data Centre Power

Avocent has launched a tool that manages heat, power and other aspects of data centre resources to help users become more efficient.

“Many users are running 30 percent more air-conditioning than they need in their data centres, simply because they don’t understand their exact requirements,” said Owen McKee, Avocent’s country manager for the UK and Ireland. MergePoint Infrastructure Explorer could help these people refine their data centres, by linking real-time measurements of power and temperature with data about IT assets and their performance.

“Most users currently do this in a spreadsheet,” said Marc Marazzi, European sales manager for Avocent. “But the data is incomplete and out of date, and difficult to work with.” The new product lets them plan work deployments in thirty minutes that would have previously taken four hours, because they can be certain that their picture of the data centre is right. Power and other resources are not wasted, and projects don’t “collide” on the racks, he said.

“Not enough users apportion power use to specific users or jobs,” said McKee. This product allows users to be certain where power is being used and to charge appropriately – and also prepares them for legislation such as the UK’s “carbon credit” CRC rules which require large users to account for power usage.

Although Infrastructure Explorer is designed for Avocent’s Mergepoint product, it can also work alongside other management products, such as CA or Tivoli, or none. It costs £750 per active deployed data centre rack, but can be used for free for jobs involved in planning rack deployments.

Although most IT equipment is supplied with a nominal figure for its power consumption and heat generation, this is only an estimate, and more effective power management requires accurate information, Avocent’s CTO Ben Grimes told eWEEK earlier this year.

There is a demonstration of Infrastructure Explorer here.