How much energy do my business applications use?
by Andy Ormsby | 04 Feb 2009 | Permalink |
Go Green, Hardware, IT Management
TKU (Tideway Knowledge Update) has recently been enhanced with the addition of hardware reference data. HRD, as we tend to call it, contains a wealth of information about common servers (you can read more about it here) and allows Tideway Foundation to provide a whole new set of useful dashboards and reports out of the box that highlight things like the biggest power consumers in the data centre, or servers which are peculiarly large for the compute power they provide.
For customers looking for candidate servers to decommission, this is great information to have.
Here are a couple of examples:
So much for hardware. But what about applications? Unless your focus is on the computing infrastructure, you may well be more interested in knowing about the power consumption of applications rather than that of the boxes in the data centre.
It turns out it isn’t difficult to do. I’ve written a simple pattern that summarises the power consumption (in watts) for each business application instance by looking at the power consumption of all the hosts that the application runs on. It makes some simple assumptions: for those hosts which are shared between multiple applications, each application is assumed to be responsible for an equal proportion of the total power consumption of the host. I take a similar approach for virtual machines.
Adding in some assumptions (easily adjusted) about the carbon cost associated with your electricity supplier, the end result is a report that lists each of the business application instances and gives an indication of the power consumption in watts and the tonnes of carbon per year that this represents.
There are some more details on the Tideway Community Forum if you’re interested in the details.
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