A software development kit from Intel Corp could give data centre manager tools to adapt the power that is fed to individual servers in response to changing server workloads and utilisation rates.
The company said it is currently doing extensive field-testing at large enterprise and leading internet data centre service providers as it puts the Intel Data Center Manager SDK through its paces.
DCM is software that provides power and thermal monitoring and management for servers, racks and groups of servers in data centres.
It builds on the company’s Node Manager system that comes with the next-generation Nehalem-EP platforms and existing management consoles.
The company said its system implements group level policies that aggregate node data across the entire rack or data centre to track metrics, historical data and provide alerts to IT managers.
This allows IT managers to establish group level power policies to limit consumption.
An added benefit is that data centres could start to increase rack density, manage power peaks, and better manage their power and cooling infrastructure.
In an official blog, Intel said that with the DCM setting policies at group and rack level, Node Manager can dynamically report the power consumed by a server and adjust it within certain range, so that the overall power consumption of the rack or a particular server group could be managed within a given target.
