Power management today is used to monitor and manage power of the hardware itself. Power management can be used in different ways 6 :
• Balanced Power and Performance Mode: this mode enables power management options that have negligible impact on system performance;
• Maximum Performance: this Power Profile setting delivers maximum performance without regard to system power usage;
• Minimum Power Usage: this setting minimizes system power usage by enabling power reduction mechanisms that may affect performance.
Today, there are several datacentre infrastructure management software (DCIM) solutions that claim to optimize energy efficiency at rack and power distribution level and this helps finding idle servers and ‘hot spots’.
OPERA aims to optimize the quest for energy efficiency in combination with the performance of the datacentre. The innovative challenge is to find ways to manage power in a more holistic way. For example, power management on 1 server could manage only that server and may ‘decide’ that it is running very efficiently on 90% of its capacity, while in fact it could be more energy efficient to share the workload over 2 different servers and have the servers work at 45% of their capacity.
To go into the energy efficiency via the power management of the hardware itself is and that in a holistic way by researching the possibilities to get the surrounding hardware in its system involved is the innovative aspect. OPERA aim also to deliver a new management tools allowing for predictive workload and tightly integrated with server capabilities through standard interfaces.
