IBM Enhances Tool To Measure Data Center Power ConsumptionIBM Enhances Tool To Measure Data Center Power Consumption

IBM made two moves in the area of data center energy consumption on Thursday.

At the same time the company said an internal study showed that its BladeCenter system uses up to 30% less energy than HP's BladeSystem, IBM also revealed an upgrade to its PowerExecutive energy-management technology.

PowerExecutive is a plug-in for IBM's system management console, Director. It monitors and displays how much power each blade is using and how hot it is. The plug-in lets users cap the amount of power used by a single server or groups of servers to optimize energy use and application performance, IBM said in a press conference on Thursday.

"Better systems and information leads to better decisions aimed at maximizing business performance," said Doug Balog, a VP for IBM BladeCenter.

Jonathan Eunice, a principal IT advisor with industry analyst firm Illuminata, says PowerExecutive is a good tool for IT managers who need to figure out their servers' power consumption. "That information is almost never available at an IT level," he says. "You can buy a power monitor, but it's almost impossible to say this blade or this workload is consuming this much energy. This is an impressive function, and they've done a good job of building it into their systems."

Eunice, however, notes that PowerExecutive will only run on newer blades because the server needs to have a built-in sensor. Older models do not have that sensor. "If you bought a chassis five years ago, it didn't have the sensor," he says. "It's not true that you'll get ubiquitous monitoring just because you have PowerExecutive."

IT managers will have a better opportunity to control energy usage with a tool that can measure how much power is used by individual servers, says Dan Olds, a principal analyst at the Gabriel Consulting Group. "From a data center perspective, unless you've done some fancy metering, all you know is a lot of electricity flows into this room, and you don't know what systems are using it, what's more efficient, what's less efficient. PowerExecutive will allow you to monitor and then control actual power usage."