Though this downturn has forced organizations to concentrate on cutting costs, it has in turn helped optimize their spending. The Green IT revolution and wide acceptance of virtualization across organizations of every size has made this fact very clear. 

Presently, the focus on Datacenter Power Management has not seen its limelight in the market. Moving forward this will be mandatory in every Datacenter operation. No doubt, it is an additional responsibility for the administrator to monitor them as well.  ‘Green IT’, if not in terms of conserving the world, at least saves thousands of dollars spent on power.

This fact was accredited by a Gartner survey made in the recent past. This survey also suggests methods to save power. However for this blog post, I’m considering only few methods, which can be achieved with zero or lesser spending.

In other words,

how to save on energy with just by monitoring and managing servers and infrastructure devices?

1. Optimize usage of under-utilized servers:  Identify the under-utilized servers and consolidate the utilization across applications. E.g. an under-utilized application server can be shared with another application or the related database in the same box, thus saving additional server and its powering cost.

2. Think twice before adding new resources: Consider current operation efficiency and project trends before buying new resources.

 It is recommended to have at least 20% reserve of server resources to meet any contingencies.

3. Identify and Replace Legacy Servers When you get a chance:  To get to this point, the very first information you need is a complete server Inventory and resource utilization details for every individual server. A tool to discover all your servers and monitor their health and performance becomes essential.

4. Virtualize:  In recent times, this is one of the hot projects carried out by administrators. The ability to quickly swap resources across different guest OSs based on the shift in usage pattern and upgrading without downtime has saved a lot to the management. Though it involves initial investment, it is not huge when compared to the investment returns. 

 It is always suggested to start your virtualization small and later spread it across your network. It is also essential to consider the nature of application that you wish to virtualize.

5. Use Tools/ Techniques to measure Datacenter environment: Typically Datacenter contains Racks with power distribution units, Cooling system, UPS, Generators, Environment monitoring devices such as Temperature sensors and cameras, with most of these devices supporting SNMP.  A network monitoring software with support for private MIBs should enable you to monitor every parameter exposed by the vendors.

It is evident that a network monitoring software is essential with capabilities to

• Report Servers Health
• Report on Top least or most utilized servers
• Network inventory reports
• Virtualization Monitoring
• Environment devices monitoring capabilities and
• Ability to support custom device type

That exactly is what OpManager gives you.

Don’t go by my words. Explore the 30 day free trial in your infrastructure and let me know what you feel about it.

Download our free 30 day trial.

Learn more about OpManager capabilities on Server Monitoring.

-Kalvin