'Advanced' Power Control for HP Servers

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HP (Quote) announced Monday that it has added advanced server power consumption control as well as collaborative remote administration capabilities to its Insight Control suite of infrastructure management tools for ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

The advanced power capping capabilities are designed to lower datacenter operating costs by improving server efficiency as well as by cutting air conditioning requirements.

In addition, HP is also providing the ability for as many as four different administrators to look at a single server’s internal functions simultaneously -– although only one has the ability to control the server, according to HP officials.

Both capabilities are comprised of technology implemented partly in the servers’ firmware as well as in HP’s management software.

“Power capping has the effect of lowering the processors’ speed by a few tenths of a gigahertz,” Scott Farrand, HP’s vice president of industry standard software, told internetnews.com.

While that may not seem like a lot, the relationship between processor speed and power consumption is not linear. Further, a server’s processors may be running at full speed but only need 30 percent of that speed to handle the applications it’s running.

“Who wants a slower app?” Farrand said. Instead of slowing the app’s performance, however, throttling down the unneeded processor horsepower lowers power consumption and thus, heat generation, decreasing both power and cooling requirements, he added.

Farrand cited internal HP tests that he said show the power savings could be used to drive twice as many servers during database transaction processing, and could yield as much as a 70 percent increase in server density in the datacenter. The new power metering and capping capabilities are added in HP Insight Power Manager, one of the tools in the Insight Control suite.

Meantime, HP is also delivering new remote management capabilities meant to let multiple administrators examine what’s going on inside a server simultaneously. Instances where this can be useful include new administrator training scenarios.

Additionally, solving a complex problem might require expertise outside that of the primary administrator. In such as case, an expert in the needed area could be brought in to provide that expertise. “It’s like a Net Meeting for server administrators,” Farrand said.

Finally, a record and playback feature enables training scenarios as well as the ability to duplicate the solution to a problem after the fact if the problem arises again.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.