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9: Green IT Case Studies for Energy Utilities 155

Next Steps for This Energy Utility’s Green Data Centers

The next steps for this utility’s green data centers include monthly reports
on server energy use correlated with server CPU utilization and thermal
information. These reports will give us the trends to help answer the ques-
tion on how data center virtualization has increased server CPU utilization
and reduced server energy use.
AEM would allow energy utilization reporting for each server. This will
work well at the data center because Active Energy Manager is an IBM
Director extension that supports the following endpoints: IBM
® ® ®
BladeCenter , POWER™, System x , and System z servers. IBM storage
systems and non-IBM platforms can be monitored through PDU+ support.
In addition, Active Energy Manager can collect information from select facil-
ity providers, including Liebert SiteScan from Emerson Network Power and
®
SynapSense (the preceding linked content resides outside of ibm.com ). The
Active Energy Manager server can run on the following platforms: Windows
® ®
on System x, Linux on System x, Linux on System p , and Linux on System
z. Active Energy Manager uses agent-less technology and, therefore, no
agents are required on the endpoints. The IT team plans to implement AEM ptg
®
along with the current Netcool system during 2009.
The IT team will continue to measure energy use and enhance reporting.
The IT team will also continue to emphasize that data center energy savings
(green data centers) are ongoing initiatives where the measurement process
will be continually improved to better quantify the savings due to energy
initiatives.
The IT team needs to continue to look at emerging technology for server
and storage enhancement. These technology areas include Information
Lifecycle Management (ILM), overall storage management, tiered storage,
Power6 technology, VMware enhancements, and enhanced cooling technol-
ogy. The IT team will also continue to work with IT vendors and other
groups/utilities on green data center technology.

The Energy Impact of the UPS

The replacement of a 20-year-old UPS was one of the initiatives in the
preceding case study. Updating old, inefficient UPS systems to high-
efficiency models can have a significant impact on your data center efficiency.
It is estimated that efficiency losses in a data center’s UPS represent about