Re: AEM or Active Energy Manager - How does this play in an i world?

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 17:46, <rob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Boss is talking about upgrading our PDU's to play with this team. ÂIs this
just for monitoring purposes or does it act like an electric water heater
in the US? ÂWhere the electric company can send a message down the power
line to shutdown electric water heaters during times of peak consumption.

They monitor and can shut down individual ports.

I can understand how individual equipment can be tuned for this. ÂFor
example, if the temperature is not that high then why spin fan motors so
high (or even spin all of them)? ÂBut how can a PDU help (other than
monitor)? ÂShut down the hardware? ÂGive it a "brown out"?

Intelligent PDUs can enable a truly scalable datacenter (if you're
scaling horizontally), however this is mostly uninteresting for IBM i
customers, since they scale vertically.

For example, let's assume you run facebook.com - you need 1000 web
servers to serve all the access from the US and Europe during a 16h
period, however Asia doesn't use Facebook that much, so you could
power down 500 Web servers during an 8h period.

Although having PDU's that I can remotely turn off/on sounds cool,
especially for a bank of modems that I often have to power cycle. ÂJust
have to make sure that alternative equipment is not plugged in, or,
perhaps I can power cycle by outlet on the pdu.

For modems, it may be a lot cheaper to purchase an IP-enabled
powerstrip, rather than an IBM-branded Intelligent PDU.