Intelligent power monitoring and management for enterprise servers

Abstract

Monitoring the dynamic power utilization of enterprise computer servers in large-scale data centers is a non-trivial undertaking. Real-time power monitoring is essential for power management and intelligent cooling provisioning and is motivated by the fact that the energy costs for many classes of servers now exceeds the initial hardware costs for the servers. The conventional approach for dynamic power monitoring requires installing hardware Power Distribution Units (PDUs) for all the servers in a datacenter, which is tedious and costly when newer data centers house up to thousands of servers. PDUs require more space in densely cramped data centers, require disruption of business-critical servers (in existing data centers) for attachment to the PDUs, and diminishes overall data center reliability (additional layer of hardware in series with the servers that can degrade in service). Oracle has introduced an innovation called Intelligent Power Monitoring (IPM), which provides accurate, real-time power utilization for servers as a function of customer load fluctuations, fan speed variations, dynamic reconfiguration events under virtualization tiers, failover events for redundant power supplies, and during times when power management features in the CPUs are performing power-capping and/or thermal-capping roles.