Right-sizing Your Power and Cooling

Joshua Townsend — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:30:01 +0000

We all know that virtualization allows us to do more with less. Fewer servers and space-saving storage (talk about an oxymoron) help us put some green in the datacenter and back in the budget. But with tight budgets demanding greater efficiency, virtualization pushing per-U-space utilization higher, and increasingly rack-dense equipment, proper planning of your physical plant remains an essential part of IT. I argue that right-sizing your power, cooling, and floor-space is more critical now than it has ever been, and is a knowing how to do it is a darn good skill for a virtualization engineer to possess.

So along those lines… I was just doing some site-prep work for a new Clariion installation and noticed that the EMC Power Calculator has been updated. It is now a pretty slick little web app that can be found on the PowerLink site (login required) here: https://powerlink.emc.com/nsepn/webapps/powercalculator/Main.aspx.

While I am at it, here are some links to other power consumption calculators. Let me know if you have others and I will update this post:

Dell: http://www.dell.com/calc
IBM: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/resources/powerconfig/index.html
NetApp: Storage Efficiency Calculator here - http://www.secalc.com – it doesn’t calculate your consumption, just what you might save over a competitor’s offering.
HP: http://h30099.www3.hp.com/configurator/powercalcs.asp
Sun: http://www.sun.com/solutions/eco_innovation/powercalculators.jsp
Hitachi/HDS: http://www.byhitachi.com/se/go/weight-and-power-calculator/
APC: http://www.apc.com/prod_docs/results.cfm?DocType=Trade-Off%20Tool&Query_Type=10 and http://www.apcc.com/products/runtime_for_extendedruntime.cfm?upsfamily=165
Emerson: Efficiency Calculator: http://www.emerson.com/edc/Calculator/default.aspx
VMware ROI Calculator: http://vmware.com/go/calculator
This site has a bunch of links to other calculators and resources: http://thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com/calculator.html

There’s some fun and timely chatter happening right now on Twitter around power consumption and sizing – join in by following me at http://twitter.com/joshuatownsend/!

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Right-sizing Your Power and Cooling