Avocent Adds Power Monitoring to DSView Server Management

Published: May 6, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While probably best known for its remotely managed KVM switches for data centers, Avocent sells a line of remote management appliances and IT management software products, too. Last week, the company announced enhancements to its DSView 3 systems and network management tool that gives it the ability to track power usage across IT equipment and also calculate the actual cost of the power used to put it into concrete terms that IT managers can bean counters can relate to.

The new DSView 3 Power Manager is a plug-in module to the DSView 3 tool that was updated last summer to monitor and manage virtual server instances as well as physical servers and their related storage and networking equipment. According to Ashish Moondra, senior product manager for power management at Avocent, the Power Manager module can monitor electricity usage from the power distribution unit (PDU) level inside a rack and then consolidate information at the rack and data center level automatically; the tool can also be used to aggregate power usage across data centers, but it cannot, as yet, tie power usage to a single server or virtual machine. Despite this limitation, the Power Manage module is a big improvement over what most data centers are currently doing, which is sending someone around with a clipboard every once in a while and taking readings off the PDUs as a snapshot of power usage. Moondra is not committing to bringing DSView down into the server (either physical or virtual level) in terms of power monitoring, which is a complex issue interfacing with the electronics of processors, memory subsystems, and I/O subsystems. Still, such tight monitoring and control is clearly something that is desirable. "Our intent is to bet more and more granular information," says Moondra.

The DSView 3 Power Manager module can also compare power usage against potential power capacity, and then allow system administrators to set thresholds for which to alert administrators or to power servers and storage on and off. Again, because of the granularity issue, the DSView 3 Power Manager module cannot set power caps in individual processors inside of a server, or cap the usage of a virtual machine inside a server. Finally, the Power Manager module allows for IT managers to plunk in their actual costs of electricity over time into the tool and generate a total cost of electricity by PDU, by rack, by data center, and across data centers. This will allow for IT managers to start doing charge-back for the electricity that various applications use to the company departments that use those applications.

The Power Manager module is part of the updated DSView 3.6 release, which will be generally available in July. DSView 3 costs $3,000 for a base configuration for 100 managed nodes.

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