Eliminating Massive Amounts of Energy Micro-Waste

JouleX: Meets the Energy Intelligence Challenge

Atlanta-based JouleX has risen to the challenge of providing energy intelligence on the full range of instrumented IT, covering everything from data center servers and HVAC equipment to office PCs, edge routers, and other networking devices. The company’s roots in network security set it apart from other energy management solutions because of its capability to listen to a much wider range of devices. The software, called JouleX Energy Management (JEM), uses network security protocols, interfaces with device management systems, and power management software such as Intel Data Center Manager (DCM), providing an unprecedented level of visibility into the relationship between energy consumption and device utilization and significantly reducing the overall energy costs of its customers.

Tackling the “Massive Amounts of Micro-Waste”

JouleX’s approach to energy management is predicated on the idea that what CEO Thomas Noonan calls “massive amounts of micro-waste” are accumulating on virtually every device that is part of the IT landscape, from servers all the way down to screen savers on PCs, HVAC equipment, and VoIP telephones.

“Today, we live in a world that is all about optimization,” Noonan says. “We don’t live in a world that is ‘on’ or ‘off’ anymore. If a device is operating at 20 or 30 percent utilization, there is no reason that it needs to be consuming full power. We can easily and automatically reduce a device’s energy consumption by 30 to 35 percent and not affect the performance, saving a lot of money and reducing a corporation’s carbon footprint. Our field customer data shows that we’re saving as much as 50 percent in some applications, with no impact to productivity.” One customer is saving more than €600,000 annually due to steps taken based on JouleX Energy Manager’s (JEM) intelligence.

JouleX, whose founders come from the information security world, takes the patterns of information capture and analysis from network security and applies them to the problem of energy management. Rather than try to replace existing management and control platforms, JEM complements and enhances management and control functions by adding a layer of information about the energy profile of all the equipment in the data center (and often beyond). Through an “agentless,” network-based implementation, JEM interfaces with devices in three primary ways:

• Through the device’s native interface
• Through the device’s management system. This is usually the ideal approach because the management system also provides critical device information about firmware updates, CPU utilization, and the allocation of resources against applications
• Natively through network protocols such as SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), SSH (Secure Shell), and others

“The ideology of ‘always on’ simply can’t exist in the future, because we are wasting an enormous amount of power,” says Noonan. “We’re out there helping people make the IT infrastructure be ‘always available, but energy-optimized.’” Micro-waste is rampant in energy-intensive data centers, where as much as 30 percent of the servers are “dead”—defined as using less than 15 percent of computing capacity but consuming 70 percent or more or their rated energy capacity, Noonan says.

But micro-waste also lurks in corners far below the threshold of perception for most facilities or IT managers, says Noonan, citing evidence such as one client’s $118,000 in annual power bills, attributed solely to screen savers running at night. Another client’s virus scan software was waking up machines to do system checks and neglecting to put them to sleep—$78,000 per year. Noonan says there is no way either client would have discovered this waste without JEM.

The Role and Benefits of Intel DCM

Intel DCM adds another level of granular information about and management control over the equipment JEM monitors in the data center. Using Intel DCM’s dynamic control capabilities, JEM customers observe the real-time power profiles of individual nodes, machines, or groups of servers and can vary the core voltage of processors anywhere along the power scale from 0 to 100 percent, dramatically improving energy efficiency. This can be done across tens of thousands of servers, in multiple locations worldwide, from a single “pane of glass” or management console. For servers with power capping technologies, JEM customers use Intel DCM to dynamically implement automated policies that are time-, location-, or event-based, allowing holistic monitoring, management, and control across a range of devices, optimizing energy and computing performance across time zones, device types, and application profiles.

Since 60 percent or more of the energy consumption of a server is in the processor, any solution made to monitor and control energy in the data center would require a high degree of visibility into the thermal, power consumption, and utilization conditions of processors. Well before the company launched in 2010, JouleX’s founding engineers started a dialogue with Intel, knowing that any solution that offered visibility into the performance of Intel hardware would be critical to the success of JouleX’s overall offering, Noonan says. Recognizing the demands that would be made for a high level of instrumentation on chips, Intel engaged with JouleX in development discussions around Intel DCM.

Participation in development discussions for Intel DCM, “gave us a granular control plane to both extract accurate energy consumption data, and at the same time deliver variable levels of control, Noonan says. In the data center, the last thing anyone wants to hear is that someone is going to “turn something off”…energy optimization in the data center requires acute visibility into power consumption and utilization at a very granular level and demands sophisticated control to reduce energy consumption without impacting performance.”

Intel DCM helps partners such as JouleX help their customers measure energy usage by device, plan for future power capacity needs, proactively identify failure situations and inefficient power consumption, and dynamically control the power draw of any number of devices, from one to tens of thousands, through a single console. With Intel DCM embedded in JEM, JouleX is able to offer one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated energy intelligence platforms available in a simple, easy to use network-based software application.

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Check out these additional CITO Research articles on energy management:
Seeing Is Believing in Data Centers
High Performance Computing Vendors Gain Energy Advantage
Power Management at the Data Center: From Capacity to Control