 "New Raritan Energy Mgmt Software To Improve DC Efficiency")
Raritan has announced enhancements to its Power IQ data centre energy management software to help companies better track and analyse energy usage down to the individual IT device level, and implement energy-saving actions anywhere in the enterprise from a central power console.
The new expanded release of Power IQ is positioned to serve as the single central console for energy management and complete rack PDU (power distribution unit) management in data centres. In addition to gathering information from IT equipment plugged into Raritan’s Dominion PX PDUs, Power IQ now also collects energy data from and provides remote power control of the following Ethernet-enabled rack PDUs: APC, Avocent, Cyber Switching, Geist, HP, MRV and Server Technology.
Other energy-management activities enabled by Power IQ include: increasing a server room’s ambient temperature gradually, creating energy cost bill-back reports to drive behaviour, forecasting potential energy savings before de-commissioning servers, and scheduling power usage at optimal times to qualify for energy rebates.
Visualising and Reporting Energy Usage
Enterprise-wide data collection enables Power IQ’s analytics to calculate and chart active power, energy consumption, cost and carbon footprint for servers and other IT devices. Power information is presented in user-configurable graphs and reports that can be accessed from anywhere with Power IQ’s Web-based dashboard. Graphs can easily depict which devices are consuming the most energy, whether power conservation efforts are working, and if there are hot spots or over-cooled areas.
Reports can be easily tailored to look at power over any user-defined time periods. In addition, trending reports and cumulative totals can be displayed at the data centre, floor, room, rack, customer and IT device level.
Remote Power Control
Power IQ 1.4 provides easy device grouping and permission management. With a simple right click command, users are able to control all outlets associated with a rack, IT device, or group of IT devices.
Power IQ’s remote power control capabilities can be used to schedule power usage, such as automatically power on or off certain device groups by day and time and by providing detailed reports on the energy savings. Device group power control also can help a data centre manager extend battery life in the event of commercial power failure by turning off a non-critical device group. Users can also program to turn on all IT devices required for a specific Web service – in configured order and with the required delays between devices.
Availability
Available worldwide through Raritan’s channel partners, Power IQ 1.4 is offered in two models – a virtual appliance and a hardware appliance. The virtual appliance is tested to run on a customer’s VMware platform. The hardware appliance is a turnkey solution on an enterprise-class server.