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This white paper is for informational purposes only, and may contain typographical errors and technical

inaccuracies. The content is provided as is, without express or implied warranties of any kind.
Brad Lawrence, Ph.D.
John Jenne





Dell Energy Smart Architecture and
Power Management Adoption
This Dell white paper addresses how Dells current server power
management architecture instills confidence in power management
feature adoption.
















ii Dell Energy Smart Architecture and Power Management Adoption












Contents
Introduction ......................................................................................... 3
Dells Energy Smart Architecture ................................................................ 3
Design ................................................................................................ 5
Measurement ........................................................................................ 6
Control ............................................................................................... 6
Reporting ............................................................................................ 7
Conclusion ........................................................................................... 9



Executive summary
Data center decision makers like you have probably noticed that IT equipment power
consumption has risen steadily from year-to-year, making energy efficiency a focal point
for customers and for equipment vendors. However, even with the increased focus,
research findings indicate low adoption rates for power management features. Lack of
awareness and concerns with the effects of power management features on IT
performance are frequently cited as potential barriers to adoption.
Dells Energy Smart Architecture (DESA) has been developed to address these concerns by
providing power management technologies that reap power-saving benefits while
operating at or near peak performance. Many power-saving features in Dells current
server lineup are simply built-in and have no effect on server performance at all. Beyond
these designs, optional power management controls exist that allow for even greater
power-saving and money-saving opportunities with minimal to zero effect on performance
for the majority of server workloads. Finally, Dell provides transparent metric reporting,
such that customers can track their power management benefits against server
performance, building confidence for power management adoption in the data center.

3 Dell Energy Smart Architecture and Power Management Adoption

Introduction
Data center equipment vendors have increased their focus on power consumption and
energy efficiency over the last several years to better meet the needs of their
customers.
1
Data center equipment can exhibit power consumption rates at idle that
are greater than 50% of the power consumed at maximum performance. With newer
processor, memory, storage, and networking technologies being introduced to keep up
with IT demands, significant power and cooling issues exist in the modern data center.
According to a recent study by The Green Grid, in addition to power consumption
issues, current power management features are not widely used due to lack of
awareness, organizational issues, the absence of a clear ROI methodology, and a
general mistrust that the features will function seamlessly and have no adverse effect
on computing performance.
2
The Dell Energy Smart Architecture (DESA) has been
developed to address todays power management needs to achieve power-saving
benefits while operating at peak performance.
Dell Energy Smart Architecture
The core tenets of DESA, built using Dell Energy Smart Technologies (DEST), are
designed for efficiency, measurement, control, and reporting. DESA optimizes
performance and power through a system-wide approach using efficient design
principles across electrical, mechanical, and thermal architectures. Combining this
with intelligent component selection sets a new bar for power efficiency in the data
center. These designs do not compete with nor compromise performance in any way.
Table 1 highlights the DESA core tenets and some of the underlying Dell Energy Smart
Technologies.

Data center
equipment can
exhibit power
consumption rates
at idle that are
greater than 50%
of the power
consumed at
maximum
performance.

The core tenets of
DESA, built using
Dell Energy Smart
Technologies
(DEST), are
designed for
efficiency,
measurement,
control, and
reporting.
4 Dell Energy Smart Architecture and Power Management Adoption

Table 1.Dell Energy Smart Architecture (DESA) core tenets and technologies
Design
Power supplies
High efficiency
Right-sized
Voltage Regulators (VRs)
High efficiency
Switching
Phase shedding
Board design
Low-loss PCB/connectors

BIOS
Processor P, C, T-states
DDR3 frequencies
DDR3 CKE
FSB power management
Thermal
High-airflow chassis
Optimized heat sinks
Independent fan control
Fan de-population
PWM fans
DIMMs with heat spreaders, sensors,
and closed loop monitoring
Components
Low voltage processors
and DIMMs
20 Gb DRAMs
UDIMMs
QR x8 DIMMs
Green hard drives
SSDs
Low power fans
Measure
Temperature
Ambient
Processor
Chipset
DIMMs
Power supplies
System-level power
Amperage
BTUs
Voltage
Watts
Performance
Processor utilization
Memory throughput
I/O throughput
Control
BIOS
Active Power Controller
(OS independent)
OS enabled processor power
management
Power management profiles
Processor core disablers
Host LOM port disablers
Unused component disablers

Firmware
Non-linear fan curve
Adaptive thermal algorithm
Closed loop thermal monitoring
Power capping
LOM port disablers
IDLE memory control
Static memory phase shedding
Power inventory/budget
Staggered power on
Dell OpenManage
Remote power On/Off
Report
Power
Averages
Peaks
Real-time
Mechanisms
Tables
Graphing


Alarms/alerts


5 Dell Energy Smart Architecture and Power Management Adoption

Design
Design improvements across the entire system account for significant power efficiency
gains. Electrical architecture contributions to power efficiency include highly
optimized power supply designs (with platform-dependent 80 PLUS

Silver, Gold and


Platinum power supplies
3
and right-sized Energy Smart supplies), highly efficient
switching voltage regulator designs, and low-loss printed circuit board (PCB) layouts
and connectors. Mechanically, DEST includes optimized venting and air baffling that
provides significant and targeted air flow through the platform, thus minimizing fan
speeds. Thermal technologies include a high number of thermal zones, low power fans,
and adaptive fan speed algorithms. These technologies are designed to passively
improve server power efficiency with no impact on performance. You may also choose
low-power processor, memory, and hard drive options to further reduce their data
center power consumption.
Figure 1 shows an example of power efficiency gains in the form of performance per
watt of a Dell PowerEdge R710 2U server over its predecessor (approximately a 100W
reduction at any given performance level). Some studies have estimated the fully
burdened cost of power (infrastructure power plus IT power) to be as high as $2 (U.S.)
per watt per year.
4
Hundreds of watts of savings per server can lead to hundreds of
thousands or millions of dollars or more in annual savings, depending on the size and
install base of the data center.
DESA Improvements to performance per watt Figure 1.

Hundreds of watts
of savings per
server can lead to
hundreds of
thousands or
millions of dollars
or more in annual
savings.



6 Dell Energy Smart Architecture and Power Management Adoption


Measurement
On Dell server platforms, iDRAC firmware collects temperature, fan speed, and power
measurements every two seconds. Server management uses these measurements to
adjust various controls accordingly. Table 2 illustrates the multiple, comprehensive
temperature sensors monitoring the processors, chipset, DIMMs, power supplies, and
ambient temperature. In addition to thermal sensors, fan tachometers monitor
independently-controlled fan speeds. Power supplies support IPMI commands and
provide fixed-interval average system power, system current, and system input
voltage. Sensors and monitoring devices have no detrimental effect on the server
performance.
Table 2. Key thermal sensors
Sensor type Sensor name Description
Temperature
Input air temperature Ambient temperature of air
entering system
Processor die temperature Die temperature of each
processor installed
DIMM temperature Temperature of each DIMM
installed
IOH temperature Temperature for I/O hub
Planar temperature Temperature on planar
PSU temperature Temperature of each power
supply installed
System Feedback
Fan tachometer Tachometer for each fan
installed
Chassis intrusion Detects chassis cover removal

Control
In addition to the server features mentioned previously that directly reduce power
consumption passively through efficient design, the data collected from the multiple
server sensors can be used with optional active, power management control algorithms
to drive additional benefits. These algorithms independently control multiple server
hardware and software features including processor and memory controller power
reduction, power profiling, power inventory and budgeting, thermal management, and
power capping. These features are not new to Dells server lineup and have been
documented in greater detail in a Dell white paper that focuses on rack and tower
servers: Dell Energy Smart Architecture (DESA) for 11G Rack and Tower Servers.
5



7 Dell Energy Smart Architecture and Power Management Adoption

Reporting
While the active power management features do come with minimal
power/performance tradeoffs, most customer demands and workloads will not be
affected by invoking these power management features. To help improve your visibility
of power/performance tradeoffs, Dell provides full and transparent reporting through a
graphical user interface (GUI) to display a full range of real-time power, thermal, and
performance metrics or graphs of these data over a specified time period. Using these
reporting methods, you can determine how various power management features affect
server performance to gain comfort and trust in using those features. Figure 2 shows
some of the power metrics that are reported, Figure 3 shows graphical power reporting
over a time interval, Figure 4 shows some of the thermal metrics that are reported,
and Table 1 illustrates the types of performance monitoring metrics that are displayed.
iDRAC GUI: Power Monitoring Figure 2.



Dell provides full
and transparent
reporting through
a GUI to display a
full range of real-
time power,
thermal, and
performance
metrics.


8 Dell Energy Smart Architecture and Power Management Adoption

iDRAC GUI: power monitoring graph Figure 3.

iDRAC GUI: temperature and fan speed monitoring Figure 4.




9 Dell Energy Smart Architecture and Power Management Adoption

Table 3. DMC GUI: performance monitoring
Sensor Type Description
CPU
% Kernel Utilization Time
% Processor Utilization Time
% User Utilization Time
Logical Disk
Logical Disk Free Space
Logical Disk IO/Sec
Memory
% Page File Usage
Available Memory
Pages IO/Sec
Network
Incoming Bytes/Sec
Incoming Packets/Sec
Outgoing Bytes/Sec
Outgoing Packets/Sec
Physical Disk
Average Access Time
Physical Disk IO/Sec
System
Context Switches/Sec
Processor Queue Length
Conclusion
Two of the four major power management concerns identified by The Green Grid have
been addressed in this white paper: the lack of awareness of power management
features and the lack of trust that performance will be maintained. Many power
efficiency features are passive and built into the Dell server architectures. Those
features which are active are extensions to the architecture and are designed to have
minimal to no effect on performance. Additionally, the real-time reporting of power
and performance data allows you to see firsthand how various power management
features affect specific servers. These capabilities and should help improve adoption
rates for other customers as well.
Industry research should look ahead to addressing the two other major concerns
identified by The Green Grid: understanding how to communicate to all parts of an
organization that benefits are realizable and will positively affect the organizations
bottom line as a whole, and developing an ROI model capable of showing OpEx, CapEx,
and environmental benefits.


10 Dell Energy Smart Architecture and Power Management Adoption

Finally, we encourage you to take advantage of the power management suite of
features that Dell offers, implement them in your data center, and observe the effect
they have in reducing your overall power consumption.
References
1. Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency Public Law
109-431, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ENERGY STAR Program, 2007,
energystar.gov/ia/partners/
prod_development/downloads/EPA_Datacenter_Report_Congress_Final1.pdf.
2. A Roadmap for the Adoption of Power-Related Features in Servers, by John
Pflueger et al., The Green Grid, 2010,
thegreengrid.org/~/media/WhitePapers/Roadmapforthe
AdoptionofPowerRelatedFeaturesinServers_v2.pdf?lang=en.
3. plugloadsolutions.com/80PlusPowerSupplies.aspx.
4. Annual Fully Burdened Cost of Power, by James Hamilton, 2008,
perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/
12/06/AnnualFullyBurdenedCostOfPower.aspx.
5. Dell Energy Smart Architecture (DESA) for 11G Rack and Tower Servers, by
John Jenne, Vijay Nijhawan, and Robert Hormuth, Dell Inc., 2009,
dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/
poweredge-11g-desa-white-paper.pdf.


About the authors
Brad Lawrence is a Next Generation Computing Solutions Product Manager at Dell focused on bringing
innovative, compelling Enterprise solutions to customers, meeting or exceeding their requirements and
expectations. Dr. Lawrence has over 16 years of experience researching, designing, and marketing computer
solutions that have spanned from mobile phones, MP3 players, & TVs to servers, storage devices and
networking gear.
John Jenne is a Chief Engineer in the Dell Enterprise Product Group focused on Node Power across the server
portfolio. John has previously held positions with Compaq, MaXXan, and Newisys. He has a B.S. in Computer
Engineering from Clemson University, an M.S.E.E. from the University of Houston, and currently holds 16
patents.



2011 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for errors or omissions in
typography or photography. Dell and the Dell logo are trademarks of Dell Inc. Other trademarks and trade
names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their
products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.
November 2011 | Rev 1.0

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