No, sorry… we’re not building a time machine. But, last week at the monthly All-Staff meeting, IMA employees were treated to a sneak peek of a monitoring project that the MIS department has in the works. It’s similar to what I wrote about in an earlier post, but on a bigger scale (by the way, that Eco-button went glitchy on me). In the IMA machine room, we have rack-mounted servers that host a variety of applications used by staff at the museum. There’s also a decent 16 terabytes (1TB = 1024GB) of disk storage in there.
One of the racks in our machine room
While perhaps not as impressive as the grocery store-size aisles of a supercomputer like the Earth Simulator (which was recently rated as the world’s most computationally-effficient supercomputer), our servers do suck their share of power. The two most significant energy inputs to this system are the cooling unit and the UPS (uninterruptible power supply).
Imagine your hair blowing in an arctic wind
Just a few hundred pounds of batteries
We have a system that monitors the power used by both the UPS and the cooling unit, and we’ve been performing measurements since February. Recently, we added a routine that calculates daily consumption for the current month. The plan is to put this information on the IMA Dashboard, and we’re using this opportunity to try out Google Charts.
Current IT power consumption for July
One of the key survival tools for anyone on the quest for sustainability is measurement. From the data we have here, it appears that we have a baseline of about 1300kWh per day. Knowing this, when we swap out hardware in the future we will be able to determine how much of an improvement we actually make, as opposed to relying on theoretical figures.
Of course, we’d like to be confident that our measurements are correct. In order to do this, we’re using Kill-A-Watt devices to measure power input on individual components in the rack. If the measurements are correct, the total power calculated from sampling individual units should be approximately equal to the power measured by the monitoring system. If not, we’ll have some investigating to do.
Tapping into a couple servers
Tapping into the main line
Hopefully, our measurements will validate and we’ll soon have live data up on the Dashboard. Until then, check out some other fancy energy usage dashboards.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:50 am
Ed,
I’m fascinated.
This new HP Performance Optimized Datacenter video just dropped…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVchzOsCX0U
And, a look inside Google’s Data Centers…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I
-Phil
July 18th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
I must say, that is some impressive hardware and storage you have there. And props on tracking your power consumption. It should be interesting to see how in the future you can both grow your storage and hardware capabilities while also lowering your power consumption. Thumbs up.
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