IBM TUAM drives energy management strategies through granular cost-tracking

Data centers are at a tipping point

For many enterprise-class organizations today, data centers represent a tremendous and growing source of expenditure—and nowhere is that problem more evident than in energy-related costs.

Why should this be the case? One reason is the rise in popularity of blade servers, which deliver enormous computing power per square foot but require high amounts of energy and generate terrific heat. In the US, electrical costs have increased as well; in the 2005-2006 timeframe, in fact, the EPA Monthly Forecast suggests they went up ten percent.

Furthermore, most data centers were built before 2001. As a result, they were never designed to support the energy dynamics associated with today's complex IT infrastructures. As a result, some estimates suggest that the annual energy costs per data center are between ten and thirty times greater than those of typical office buildings. And going forward, as the enterprise continues to leverage data centers to generate greater and greater business value, this situation is only likely to become more of a challenge.

Energy consumption will fall, yet the impact in service levels will be imperceptible to customers. Organizations can thus fulfill customer needs in an optimized, energy-aware way. How can organizations create and optimize effective energy management strategies? One obvious solution suggests itself: they must deploy energy-aware financial management tools. Only in this way can companies make the connections between business services and energy costs visible—ideally in a granular way, to create accountability, and yet also in a consolidated way, to track power usage across different technologies, groups and services. Both facilities usage and data center usage must be incorporated to deliver a holistic energy management solution, capable of maximizing the business value of deployed assets while minimizing the energy costs associated with them as much as possible.

In short, organizations today must ask and answer key questions such as: How much energy is being consumed? How much money does that equate to? Which services are costing the most in power consumption? Which groups are generating the highest energy costs, and what is the business case for those costs?

TUAM delivers the insight needed to empower energy management strategies

Relevant in all of these contexts is IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager (TUAM). This cross-platform tool helps IT managers to visualize and quantify the costs of providing information services—including energy costs—in terms of products, services, organizational groups or business functions. TUAM measures, analyzes, reports and generates bills based on costs spanning many different IT assets, ranging from servers to networks to complex virtualized environments.

And as a means of tracking and quantifying energy costs in particular, the business case for TUAM is exceptionally strong. TUAM boasts universal data collectors capable of drawing cost data from a broad array of different applications and services, including both IBM and third party solutions. This functionality is supplemented with new features which allow the solution to collect data from IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management. Together, these two tools can be leveraged to create the customizable, granular energy cost-tracking organizations require to fine-tune their energy management strategies—leading to higher accountability for energy cost generation, lower energy costs and ultimately a greener way of creating and supporting business services.

Pinpointing energy usage and costs—within groups and IT assets

Consider how the solution might work in a specific case. Within a given organization, major operational divisions might include Distribution, Marketing, Manufacturing and Point of Sale. Each division has its own goals, initiatives, resources, staff and business processes. Yet each also relies heavily on the organization's IT infrastructure, which includes one or more data centers, themselves composed of hundreds or even thousands of different physical hosts, each of which could be supporting multiple virtual servers.

Clearly, isolating the energy costs involved for each division, let alone in any finer granularity, would normally be a tremendous challenge due to the complex, shared nature of this IT infrastructure. Yet with TUAM and its new energy management functionality, that challenge is met—and overcome. Once TUAM is deployed, IT managers can simply create accounts mapping to each major division. Thanks to the solution's data collectors, which are now extended to support IBM Tivoli for Energy Management, those accounts will then reflect energy usage and energy costs for each division in real time. This information can be depicted in many configurable ways, ranging from pie graphs to bar charts to rank-ordered lists―whichever seems most helpful in establishing expenditures.

In the event that one division’s utilization is exceptionally high, therefore, accountability for it is easily generated. If necessary, this accountability can be pursued via the organization's governance model, to help cap unusually high energy expenditures unless the business case within that division can justify them.

More, those same divisions will have access to their own energy data whenever they need it. And within that data, they can determine the energy costs associated with different IT resources—establishing, for instance, which servers they use are the most energy-efficient (or inefficient) in a business context, and making changes as suggested by that data. Organizational groups can thus monitor and manage their own energy usage far more effectively than ever before, helping to drive down energy costs through improved visibility.

TUAM helps fulfill IBM's service management vision

Finally, TUAM can (and should) be considered as just one element in a larger energy management strategy which serves as an excellent example of IBM's service management value proposition in general.

Energy accounting and chargeback of this type, in conjunction with IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management, can help generally optimize IT assets for energy usage and establish and optimize green business services in a broad sense. They can drive energy-aware IT tasks in general, such as server provisioning, to help align server energy consumption with customer demand in real time, conserving energy when the demand doesn't require it. Energy consumption will fall, yet the impact in service levels will be imperceptible to customers. Organizations can thus fulfill customer needs in an optimized, energy-aware way.

For business managers, then, TUAM helps put energy management in a service management context, mitigating the threat of one of today's most daunting operational challenges while also keeping IT and business services in close alignment with customer demand.

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