November 5th, 2009
HP: How about your own personal smart grid for your data center?
As part of its new HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture, Hewlett-Packard is touting a real-time energy-efficiency policy that it calls the HP Data Center Smart Grid.
Essentially, the philosophy combines the features of several different HP energy management products, including HP Environmental Edge, which I wrote about separately just yesterday, as well as HP Insight Control. Taken together, these and other products in the company’s data center portfolio will let you collect, monitor and communicate power and cooling metrics across your infrastructure in real time. The goal is to help businesses reduce operating costs, help data center operators optimize facilities layouts and investments, and improve reliability. The technology has the added benefit of allowing you to create all sorts of reports that you can serve up to the boardroom types who are concerned about Green IT or sustainability measures.
There are a couple of new features associated with the individual tools. For example, Environmental Edge has been updated to allow you to track thermal activity over time, so you can do better trending. HP Insight Control, meanwhile, has been updated to include a feature called Data Center Power Control. This is actually IS like something you’d find in the electricity grid: basically, it helps make sure that power allocation stays steady during peak energy usage or in periods of electricity brown-outs. Basically, you can prioritize consumption levels based on policies or on the priority of particular server workloads.
And, oh my goodness, they’ve actually included some pricing details. HP Environmental Edge starts at about $10 per square foot of data center space or $350 per rack. HP Insight Control Data Center Power Control starts at $549.
Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist in the New York area with more than 20 years experience covering the high-tech industry. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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