Power Assure Technology
Data Center Power Optimization Technology
At the heart of Power Assure’s software service for data centers lies a sophisticated cyclical process that allows operators to:
-
Collect power, environmental and utilization details every minute
-
Track application and utilization demand
-
Calculate required capacity and safety buffers
-
Perform adjustments to increase reliability and availability
-
Verify the impact and visualize the results
EM/4 provides an automation platform and monitoring, analytics and processing modules that can be combined easily to provide solutions from simple facility or IT monitoring to a fully automated lights-out data center with multi-site redundancy and dynamic load shedding and shifting. It is on you as a customer to decide on the level of instrumentation and automation and it is on us to make sure it works, seamlessly, without major replacements of existing components and infrastructure and most importantly without any violation of application service levels.
Power Assure Key Technology Capabilities
Auto Discovery
The Power Assure auto discovery modules help to identify data center components, synchronize inventory, identify available measurement points and can update the configuration automatically or with predefined manual approvals.
Analytics Engine
Developed as an extension to the company's process automation platform, Power Assure's patent-pending analytics engine dynamically determines how much server capacity a data center needs to support the compute demands of any specific application. This high performance, computing cluster was designed to calculate a large number of variables in real time and to determine the optimum number of servers needed as demand spikes and falls over the course of a day. With the release of EM/4 it has been further enhanced to support what/if analysis for discreet improvements and virtual or physical consolidation. With additional application tiers and in cooperation with PARC such calculations can also determine optimal configurations for multi-tiered virtual application clusters.
Distributed Process Automation Platform
The Power Assure platform includes an underlying process automation system for “lights out” data center management. This technology has been developed over 10 years and is proven in large enterprise data centers. Power Assure has extended this platform and combined extensive data feeds and demand algorithms to optimize data center energy management and determine server capacity in real-time. Through comprehensive runbook automation processes, server capacity is automatically adjusted. The software also automatically adjusts cooling and other facility resources. Power Assure verifies the impact, measures QoS, makes comparisons to set SLAs, and then repeats the cycle.
Power Assure Five-tier Optimization Architecture
Power Assure provides an innovative, five-tier architecture to coordinate, visualize, and optimize data center power consumption while maintaining and enhancing application service levels and reliability.
Agentless Integration Tier
The Integration tier interfaces with the data center power management, environment management, and IT equipment. Power Assure boasts interoperability with over 10,000 devices from over 500 vendors in over 200 categories. The integration with the facility network and IT management layer of the existing environment requires no agents and gathers and disseminates information transparently through the use of physical or virtual data collection appliances. These appliances also perform actions as part of the automation services either individually or in a concerted approach.
Visualization and Data Collection Tier
The Visualization and Data Collection tier drives multi-faceted analysis of large, real-time data sets and displays results through advanced visualization. Advanced KPIs summarize the power, capacity, and performance of the data center. Power Assure provides drill-down capabilities to view statistics at the data center, PDU, rack, and individual device level. Data, information and action execution is usually retained for at least 36 months for audit purposes and improvement tracking. The visualization tier includes the following capabilities:
- Integrated Facility and IT dashboard for one or multiple data centers
- Drill down capabilities by region, site, building, floor, room, space
- Rack view with graphical view of rack content including placement of equipment
- Power distribution panel view with graphical representation of power hierarchy
- Heat maps and air pressure maps
- Custom floor plans can be uploaded from CAD, Images
- Data center capacity prediction, including complex calculation engine
- Complete and flexible reporting engine
Analytics Tier
The Analytics tier is a calculation cluster capable of running models based on the data collected. Such models include what-if analysis, alerts and correlation.
Other models supported by the Analytics tier include:
- What-if analysis to guide server placement based of capacity, utilization, weight and power draw
- Device health monitoring and predictive alerts
- CO2 emission calculation
- Cost accounting and chargebacks based on business units or user groups - including for virtualized application environments
- Utilization detection based on power consumption
Action Tier
The Action tier sets Power Assure apart from all other power management and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) alternatives. Only Power Assure provides automation capabilities to dynamically adjust capacity and associated facility resources such as cooling. The platform offers powerful modules to enable sophisticated automation of data center operations including:
- Power capping and throttling on facility and environmental error conditions
- Dynamic adjustments of cooling capacity from server inlet temperature
- Dynamic server load shedding and shifting
- Virtualization manager that extends power management saving and visibility to VMware, Citrix, Xen, and PowerVM environments
The Global Energy Intelligence Tier
Global Energy Intelligence is a hosted service provided by Power Assure that provides each installation with an option to subscribe and utilize shared information like power pricing, utility alerts, demand response requests and other energy availability information needed for planning and emergency preparation.
|
