Modius Data Center Blog

Enterprise software Proof-of-Concepts (POCs) are often challenging to administer and implement as they typically require the vendor to train, install and implement the software in the client’s facility.  This process can prove costly and time consuming for both the vendor and the client. 

Modius has solved this challenge by creating a new offering for a “virtual” proof of concept (vPOC).  The vPOC allows customers to try Modius OpenData in a secure sandbox environment without installing any local software. 

The database is pre-populated with a typical Data Center environment including a full range of data center equipment, including typical ‘heavy equipment’ such as UPS, CRAC, Genset, PDU, as well as rack-level equipment such as iPDU’s and wireless temperature sensors from leading equipment providers including HP, IBM, APC, Emerson, RFCODE, and Server Tech.

The vPOC provides a fully-functional instance of the Modius OpenData system that the user can manage and administer.  The Graphical User Interface (GUI) allows the user to drill through to each device and identify which alarm points are being collected, how they are correlated and distributed, their polling rates, and which “real-time” alarms are critical or require immediate action. Typical customers who are signing up for a Modius vPOC are looking to replace several existing monitoring point solutions (e.g. homegrown, ALC or DataTrax).  In addition, they may be looking at Modius OpenData’s “multi-site” capability to consolidate existing infrastructure monitoring across multiple locations with a single repository of easy accessed and reported information for availability, capacity, and performance utilization.

The process to get started is as simple as signing up for the 15-Day free trial.  To get started, please see our vPOC registration page for a simple form to have one of our team contact you.

Over the past year, many customers have found themselves in the midst of very real ‘Sustainability’, ‘Eco-efficiency’ or ‘Green’ initiatives. The core requirement of these initiatives is to establish energy and efficiency baselines to ultimately determine how energy is being used and where optimizations can be made to improve performance. These are very visible, corporate governance-style initiatives which tend to appear in quarterly reports. Both the CIO and CFO are very serious about taking proactive steps to demonstrate and report where investments are being made to get this skyrocketing cost under control.

One of the areas being investigated deals with the various types of instrumentation available within the modern data center. More specifically, the CIO/CFO are looking for their IT management team to take advantage of available tools, setting up a well-defined means to monitor all available energy-related data points in real-time and building an ITIL-inspired run-book of “continuous optimization,” more commonly refered to as “operational intelligence.”

It can be shown that modern data centers are complex systems with a tremendous quantity of physical infrastructure devices already in place: some are components with monitoring capabilities built-in, some with monitoring features optionally available, and finally others without any monitoring capabilities whatsoever. IT Managers are now realizing that more real-time monitoring is always better to help make better informed decisions to support these ‘Greening’ initiatives. Granular, concise, real-time information will allow trends to be seen, thresholds to be set, and plans to be made. Tactically, there are various approaches to device instrumentation and most IT situations will actually require a combination of several instrumentation technologies to work together, allowing a complete picture of status, availability, capacity and efficiency.

It is critically important to note that the current less-than-optimal state of active energy monitoring through instrumentation within the modern data center is a direct result of the historical complexity to do so. There has been a complete lack of comprehensive distributed enterprise-class solutions to gather, analyze, and make informed energy management decisions across the litany of raw data sources.

Ultimately, the technology to provide this continuous monitoring of vast discreet sources of data points is now available to be deployed and consumed at will. In support of these corporate initiatives, looking forward is critical because the game has changed, dramatically. The stakes are higher. The players have stepped up.

In 2007, the “Energy Independence and Security Act” was passed by congress and is sometimes referred to as “HR6” (see below). In this energy efficiency Act, Section 453 is a section dedicated to the application of this Act to the datacenter and the timeframes specified for doing so.

In general, the Act identifies a national goal by the year 2011 for all corporations to fully understand their energy consumption with some level of granularity. Now what is important here is that the Act appears to have raised some significant awareness across all ranks and corporate executives (“CxO”) that energy consumption is not only the largest (and rapidly growing) component of IT spending, but the details of this usage almost entirely an unknown. Assuming the likely scenario that the relevant government agencies continue to push for energy efficiency and independence, the HR6 Act will be applied to ALL companies within the US, public or private, and will become a hot topical discussion item in all of the coming stake-holder and shareholder meetings alike. This will affect us all in 2011!

As a background, the Act considers any facility or portion of a facility that “primarily contains electronic equipment used to process, store, and transmit digital information” and which “uses environmental control equipment to maintain the proper conditions” to be a datacenter, dedicated or not. So, essentially any company with IT of any nature will be well advised to consider “HR6-453” very strategically and make plans towards its goals now.

The good news is that the Act as written today, is focused on “Eco-Reporting” of all IT and facility assets alone, rather than the control and active reductions of energy consumption to any prescriptive level. (Those recommendations and opportunities will come next). It articulates that baselines should be drawn up that reflect “datacenter efficiency holistically, reflecting the total energy consumption” for IT equipment and the facilities around which they are housed. It recommends that these baselines be documented, auditable and available for analysis or governmental submission (if requested) over the next year.

Towards this end, monitoring systems should be evaluated with specific projects identified and put in place THIS YEAR (2010) that have the ability to measure and view energy consumption for all IT related consumption, equipment, cooling, facilities, etc. These systems will have a unique opportunity today to be initially deployed for compliance with HR6 in 2011, and yet at the same time become the framework and basis for the next expected phase of (likely) mandated behavior which will deal with actually increasing the efficiency for the IT function across all companies in the US.

Additionally and in support of this and subsequent Acts, the EPA is busy developing metrics in their Energy-Star programs which will set efficiency KPIs associated with IT equipment. In short order, guidelines (and later mandates) will exist that require the active monitoring and reporting, usage of increasingly efficient equipment, cooling and facilities infrastructure equipment, and the continuous optimization of the entire IT ‘system’ for increased energy efficiency much like ITIL has been suggesting for years. Given the roadmap ahead, now is the time to start planning for the inevitable.

Mark Harris
Vice President, Product Management
Mark.Harris[at]Modius.com