Data Aware Power Management

Server utilisation data

Tracking server utilisation levels can be an important starting point for operators in reducing the energy use by IT — the biggest consumer of energy in a data centre. However, more than half of organisations do not track this data, according to survey respondents.

Operators monitor utilisation to ensure that IT capacity is available to deliver work and ensure good response times — particularly during high-demand periods. However, utilisation data can also be used to make informed decisions about improving energy efficiency.

Accurately measuring average server utilisation is the first step in assessing work-per-energy performance. Utilisation can be matched with server capacity values to calculate the delivered work in the data centre. This value can then be divided by a server energy consumption measurement, or an estimate by adjusting the IT energy measurement used to calculate the power usage effectiveness, to generate a work-per-energy metric for a whole server fleet. However, less than one-third of survey respondents can calculate this useful metric using existing data.

Regional Policies

It is widely said that IT managers mostly disable server power management after turning on the servers due to concerns about its potential impact on performance.

Uptime Intelligence research shows, however, that the use of power management is widespread, if not strong. Companies in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa are more likely to have policies for using server power management than their counterparts in other regions.

This is likely driven by access to capital and energy — and possible cultural attitudes toward waste. This widespread use of power management suggests that many organisations are successfully deploying the technology while maintaining the reliability and performance of their servers. Further, larger facilities (i.e., greater than 10 MW of installed IT capacity) are more likely (71%, n=48) to have these policies in place than others (50%, n=185) by 21 percentage points. This suggests it is worthwhile investing resources in power management for applications that can withstand it due to the potentially significant energy savings.

Power Management Service Tools

Subpico is a member of the Uptime Institute, a global organisation that looks at and provides a platform for carriers , data centre managers, builders and engineers to share and address issues in the datacentre Industry.

Subpico Power Management Tools

Subpico provides tools to help increase the utilisation of server, storage and network equipment and reduce the power demand of the hardware at lower utilisation levels - i.e. increase the work performed for each unit of energy consumed.

Our technology is based on a simple concept, AGC (Automatic Gain Control). All modern devices have audio inputs and an AGC function that translates your voice for encoding. Our human voice has both power (loudness) and pitch (frequency). AGC just transforms the input from the microphone to a workable range for the encoder to make a bit stream for transmission. Instead of a microphone, we have input data signals. Instead of an encoder, we have data centre servers, load balances' etc. The idea is the same to be able to sift, control and direct the flow of legitimate signal from noise. This requires a deep understanding of the traffic services and protocols on the input. - This is our world and expertise.

The Uptime Institute IT and Power Efficiency Survey 2024 asked data centre operators about the data they are collecting as well as the metrics tracked to assess and report their work-per-energy performance. The results show that opportunities for reducing energy use and costs are often overlooked.

The following is a summary of the survey showing the need for data-level aware power management tools that are easily integrated and vendor agnostic. Subpico Power Management Units provide a solution in this gap. We are very excited to work with some Industry giants to address a problem that sets a boundary condition on our Datacentre Utilisation.

Target Utilisation

Despite a growing need to reduce IT energy use, less than half of operators (46%, n=212) globally set targets to increase server utilization levels, according to survey respondents.

A regional view of the data reveals that in Europe and North America, fewer organisations set utilisation objectives for servers than their counterparts elsewhere. Companies in Asia-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa may be more likely to do so because of tighter budgets and concerns about energy availability, which both leave little room for inefficiency.

This is expected to change over time. Data centre operators in North America and Europe, which tend to have larger facilities, will become more incentivised to set these targets due to the impact of regulatory requirements and the possibility of significant energy cost savings.

A breakout by data centre capacity size reveals that 60% of facilities with more than 10 megawatts (MW) of installed IT capacity (n=40) set utilisation objectives — a 17 percentage point difference compared with smaller facilities (43%, n=168).

Tracking Power Demand

Most data center operators appear to be missing valuable opportunities when it comes to understanding how their servers use power.

More than half (52%) of organisations do not track average power demand data for their servers, which mirrors the high proportion of companies that do not record average server utilisation data.

Both power demand and utilisation are used by systems management teams in real time to help manage the power throttling of servers or prevent the overloading of circuits during high demand periods. However, less than one-third of survey respondents aggregate this data to report and analyse power usage at the server, rack or data centre level.

Organisations that track this data regularly can use it to optimise their strategies for capacity planning and for managing facility power resources, which can lead to improving the overall efficiency of their operations. Managers can also use this data to satisfy the reporting and energy efficiency requirements that are emerging globally due to new regulations.

Half of those organisations that enable server power management do so for at least 50% of their overall server fleet, according to survey respondents.

While it may not be practical for all workload types, enabling even a small percentage of the server fleet with power management can lead to significant energy savings. For example, deploying power management to just 10% of the server fleet can lead to a 1% to 2% reduction in overall IT energy use.

However, its use needs to be weighed against performance, application and customer requirements. Resources need to be dedicated to testing and ensuring power management functions do not risk the performance of critical applications.

Server power management

Less than half of organizations test applications to determine how they perform if server power management is enabled. Organizations with policies to use server power management are more likely to conduct these tests (67%, n=95) than others by 50 percentage points (17%, n=76), according to survey respondents. This suggests that a significant number of organizations overlook server power management as a way to reduce energy use and costs, even if it would be practical for a specific workload.

Application and Service Testing