Power Assure's Dynamic Power Management Adjusts Data Center Capacity in Real Time for SaaS Provider, Cytak

The application utilization for larger server farms in today's data centers is typically highly volatile due to numerous factors. Time of day usage patterns, promotions and advertisements, and unexpected events all cause spikes in demand. As a result, data center operators have to deal with a high level of uncertainty when planning capacity. To mitigate the risk, operators over-provision equipment, keeping their entire pool of servers “always on.” As a result, their average utilization drops below 20% with occasional peaks of 85-90%. Power Assure offers a new “always available” model to lower power consumption -- as illustrated in the Cytak case study -- saving more than 56% over the “always on” model.

Project Case: Adjusting Data Center Capacity in Real Time

Cytak, a leading sales and use tax software as a service (SaaS) provider, submitted a request to Power Assure to perform a case study to understand the savings potential associated with moving from an “always on” model to an “always available” model using Power Assure's Dynamic Power Management software. Cytak also requested power consumption comparisons between its servers and off-the-shelf, low cost servers.

Power Assure set up a demonstration environment with 40 servers to simulate the load and savings opportunities using Dynamic Power Management technology. Based on the load provided by Cytak, Power Assure made adjustments for their simulation environment. The first task was to find out the power consumption of the “always on” model with all servers running and load influencing idle/loaded power consumption in a 31-hour timeframe.

For the “always available” model, the number of servers that run at any given time was calculated based on the actual load (transactions/sec) plus a safety buffer. The remaining servers were shut down and turned off until they were needed. Power Assure uses a one-minute interval to verify load and calculate the amount of servers needed to support it using Power Assure's calculation engine. The buffer was set to 20% to have enough capacity available to support the spikes on Black Friday.

The Result: “Always Available” Model Lowers Power Consumption

The total power consumption for the 31-hour run in “always on” mode was 39.63kWh, while the total power consumption for the “always available” mode was 17.12kWh. As a result, Cytak realized a 56.79% savings using the “always available” model, where Dynamic Power Management from Power Assure adjusted data center capacity in real time. In addition, based on the monitoring results from the hardware comparisons, Power Assure recommended that Cytak should include power measurements into its procurement cycle to minimize power consumption for a given performance target.