Environmental Enhancements - IBM System z10 EC Reference Manual

Environmental Enhancements

Power and cooling discussions have entered the budget
planning of every IT environment. As energy prices have
risen and utilities have restricted the amount of power
usage, it is important to review the role of the servers to
balance IT spending.
Workload consolidation can help to balance IT budget
spending. The z10 EC is designed to reduce energy
usage by greater than 80% and save floor space by
greater than 85% when used to consolidate x86 servers***.
With increased capacity the z10 EC virtualization capabili-
ties can help to support hundreds of virtual servers in a
single 2.83 square meters footprint.
Power Monitoring
The "mainframe gas gauge" feature introduced on the
System z9 servers, provides power and thermal informa-
tion via the System Activity Display (SAD) on the Hardware
Management Console and will be available on the z10 EC
giving a point in time reference of the information. The cur-
rent total power consumption in watts and BTU/hour as
well as the air input temperature will be displayed.
Power Estimation Tool
Only the System z10 EC and System z9 servers provide
a tool available on IBM Resource Link which provides the
user an estimate as to the anticipated power consumption
of a particular machine model and its associated configu-
ration. A user will input the machine model, memory, and
I/O configuration and the tool will output an estimate of the
power requirements needed for this system.
IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager
IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manger (AEM) is a
building block which enables customers to manage actual
power consumption and resulting thermal loads IBM
servers place in the data center. On the z10 EC, power
monitoring information can be fed into the IBM Systems
Director AEM for Linux on System z, a plug in feature of
IBM Director. AEM for Linux on System z allows tracking of
trends for both the z10 EC as well as multiple server plat-
forms. With this trend analysis, a data center administrator
can properly size power inputs and more accurately plan
data center consolidation or modification projects.
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