Going green makes a lot of financial and environmental sense — but getting there has its own challenges. Roughly 40-50% of corporate energy consumption goes to IT, and computing-center power costs have more than doubled over the last five years. Many HPC (high-performance computing) environments and data centers are pushing their limits of physical size, power supply, and cooling capacity.

Some organizations are actually exacerbating these limits and the associated problem of sharply increasing energy costs by expanding their physical facilities, increasing their IT power supply, and implementing other stopgap measures rather than really solving their power-consumption and cooling issues. In fact, under current trends, the cost of energy used to power IT hardware is expected to exceed hardware costs as early as 2009.

What those organizations really need is an easily implemented, intelligent power-saving management tool. Such a tool will enable them to achieve estimated energy-consumption reductions of as much as 50% for underutilized servers through implementing policies that automate power-saving-mode activation in a workload-aware manner as well as additional savings through thermal balancing and effective orchestration of server virtualization.

Rocks+MOAB seamlessly and automatically . . .

• Monitors system energy use by collecting power and temperature data from servers and other resources to give you a global view of power consumption and where you can achieve reductions in consumption and cost.
• 
  
• Reports on energy use by user, project, and resource through extensive reporting and charting facilities to help administrators and managers understand how resources are being used, how power is being consumed, and what actions can be taken to reduce overall power consumption.
• 
  
• Reduces energy use through intelligent power-management and workload-consolidation policies. Rocks+MOAB’s power-management policies automatically place idle servers in power-savings modes, and workload-consolidation policies intelligently pack workload on underutilized servers using both traditional and virtualization technologies.
• 
  
• Reduces energy use through cost- and temperature-based workload scheduling. By dynamically managing workload time-of-day and location scheduling based on workload priority, hardware temperatures, and power costs, Rocks+MOAB further reduces energy consumption and heat while ensuring optimized performance.