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The Greening of IT
32 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure

One of the first steps needed in any IT project is to measure the cur-
rent status of energy use. That baseline will be a guideline as to the
improvements to be made. A major problem in this area is that build-
ings have been typically equipped with one electric meter for the entire
building. If the building is almost all data center, the measurement
problem is not so bad. However, if the data center is only a small portion
of the building, measurement of the current energy use in your data cen-
ter is a significant first issue you need to consider.
To assist in this measuring task, server manufacturers are starting to
provide devices in the server itself that can be monitored. For example,
IBM has recently made significant enhancements to a tool for measuring
and managing energy use in servers and other IT equipment. The tool is
IBM Active Energy Manager™ (AEM), an extension of the IBM Director
®
already used by many companies. AEM has hooks to Tivoli for energy
management. It is a significant step forward in energy management for
looking at the actual energy use of each server. With this type of tool, ptg
you can measure energy-saving results when, for example, you virtualize
ten stand-alone Windows servers onto a big server using PowerVM or a
similar virtualization system. You can also measure the efficiency advan-
tages of using the steps toward grid computing, such as Partition
Mobility. Additional details on the AEM tool for IT energy measure-
ment and management are in Appendix A, “Green IT Checklist and
Recommendations.” The Web site for the latest information on the
Active Energy Manager tool is http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/
management/director/extensions/actengmrg.html.

Tools for IT Energy Measurement, Monitoring, and
Management

This AEM tool and similar tools provide solutions to help companies
monitor energy consumption to allow better utilization of available
energy resources. The application software enables customers to trend
actual energy consumption and corresponding thermal loading of IT sys-
tems running in their environment with their applications. Such moni-
toring helps companies do the following: