Get Power over Power: Go Green with IBM Tivoli

Green energy management gives you power over power

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective.The argument for green energy management has never been stronger. Among other points to consider:

  • IT budgets are typically either flat or shrinking. Yet energy costs are escalating rapidly. In the particular case of the data center, energy costs are not just the fastest-growing element of the total cost picture; they are often already the single largest element.
  • As IT becomes more and more central to business operations, power requirements may well climb in proportion.
  • Most data centers were not designed for the power requirements they now face. Unless optimized energy management strategies are implemented, service levels could decline, leading to a poor customer/user experience.
  • Organizations that have "gone green" can use that fact for promotional purposes—distinguishing themselves in a competitive market as environmentally responsible and forward-thinking.

That said, moving forward with green initiatives is usually much easier said than done. To a significant extent, this is because most organizations lack the visibility to understand and quantify how they need to change—to determine how, when, where, and why power is consumed, and then create a strategy designed to make that change as effective as possible without threatening necessary service levels.

If you're the CIO of an organization with a multi-building campus, for example, you probably track energy in a number of different ways depending on context. One set of tools is used to track and control the energy costs generated by facilities assets in a data center; another is used to do the same task for IT assets. And outside the data center altogether, yet another group of solutions is likely to be used. Arriving at a holistic picture of energy usage, given such an array of tools, is a complex and cumbersome matter.

See the complete energy picture with IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management

“IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management works by integrating with both IT and non-IT assets, collecting the energy data coming from them, and pooling it for analysis. And if you think the only compatible assets are those offered by IBM, think again; this solution leverages IBM's extensive list of industry partnerships to provide remarkably complete tracking and monitoring.”What if your organization had the power to bring all energy information from different domains together—under a single pane of glass—and then analyze it to track utilization and discover problems, trends, and patterns?

Given that kind of centralized insight, optimized energy management strategies would be easier to create, easier to implement, and easier to modify over time in response to changing conditions or requirements.

This is the idea behind IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management. It's a truly comprehensive enterprise-class energy management solution that can be used in as many contexts as the enterprise requires, from the data center to the office building, and applies to all related assets and business domains. It can also analyze energy information over time, looking for developments that might affect current energy strategies (or suggest better ones).

These capabilities, in turn, translate into many compelling benefits. In addition to reducing energy costs and achieving higher business resilience, for instance, organizations can determine and then minimize their carbon footprints—an increasingly attractive point in today's green-conscious world. It also becomes significantly easier to comply with current and future government energy regulations.

An extensive range of partnerships delivers federated, pane-of-glass insight

IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) for Energy Management works by integrating with both IT and non-IT assets, collecting the energy data coming from them, and pooling it for analysis. And if you think the only compatible assets are those offered by IBM, think again; this solution leverages IBM's extensive list of industry partnerships to provide remarkably complete tracking and monitoring.

Among other IBM partners who offer compatible solutions, for instance, are Schneider Electric, Siemens, Eaton, Johnson Controls, Matrikon...and the list grows longer every year. The result is that ITM for Energy Management becomes a more and more powerful and holistic solution as time passes and the number of integrations increases.

Once collected, energy information can then be correlated in different contexts or analyzed for trends—key insight needed to see how the total energy picture is changing and suggest an intelligent response. Imagine that HVAC assets in a data center are less efficient than they might be; what is the business impact going to be on services associated with that data center? Because ITM for Energy Management can monitor both IT and facilities assets, that question has suddenly become easier to answer accurately. And given an accurate answer, the organization can take action more quickly and more effectively to detect and solve the problem…or anticipate it, and prevent it from happening in the first place.

ITM for Energy Management thus puts energy information in a service management context. If the ultimate goal of service management is to align services as closely as possible with customer/user needs and interests, keeping those services up and running is clearly critically important. This solution provides the information organizations need to make that happen—in as much or as little detail as the context demands.

Seamless integration with the Tivoli portfolio for even more power

Additional value stems from the fact that IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management integrates not just with facilities and IT assets, but also with other members of the IBM Tivoli service management portfolio that an organization may be using. In this way, the insight it creates can be extended to solve different problems or answer different questions.

One such integration is that with IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager (TUAM), arguably the best available solution for cost tracking of all kinds. This powerful solution can determine and report on the costs created by systems, services, business teams, particular projects, IT applications…essentially, any form of cost that an organization might wish to track.

To perform that job, however, one element of the cost picture that TUAM will certainly need to consider is energy costs. And thanks to the fact that it integrates with ITM for Energy Management, energy information is routed directly to TUAM. If an organization wants to know (for instance) how rapidly energy costs are accelerating as a result of a new, outward-facing service offered over its Web site, these IBM solutions can work together to provide the answer.

Alternately, imagine that the same organization wants to determine in advance what the business impact might be if the data center providing that service were to experience an energy outage during a particular season of the year.

In this context, IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager—which correlates IT asset status with business performance—is right on point. Using the trending and historical data available from ITM for Energy Management, this solution can extrapolate how well, or how poorly, the organization might fare in the event of an outage. Then, armed with that knowledge, system planners and administrators can begin to assess what they'll need to do to ensure that doesn't happen—maximizing both the service's availability and the return on investment it delivers.

Finally, organizations seeking the highest value from the solution will be glad to hear that it now provides extended agents, reporting, and analytic capabilities in support of IBM's new Intelligent Building Management offering (as announced in June). Via this offering, organizations can achieve truly end-to-end insight into and control over how energy is consumed—the most complete solution to unite business services, IT assets, and facilities available today.

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IBM: a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for APM

In the latest release of the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Gartner, Inc. has identified IBM as a leader. *Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring, Will Cappelli and Jonah Kowall, 19 September 2011.

View the Gartner report.

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