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Power Assure and PARC to Virtualize Power Consumption in Data Centers

January 28, 2010 by Jeff Shepard

Power Assure Inc. and Palo Alto Research Center Inc. (PARC), a center for commercial innovation, announced that the two companies will work on a technology project to reduce data center power consumption. The companies were recently awarded a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for joint product development and Power Assure’s commercialization of the resulting integrated energy-efficiency solutions for large data centers.

Power Assure and PARC are working together to make a transformative change in the management of servers in data centers, with the ultimate goal of significantly reducing overall power consumption. According to a recent EPA report, data center energy use in the U.S. will reach 100 billion kWh per year by 2011. Yet average server utilization in industrial data centers is currently only 10-15%, creating an "Always On" infrastructure that wastes substantial amounts of electrical energy to run and cool idle servers.

Power Assure and PARC will jointly develop technologies to increase the options available for data centers that want to move from "Always On" to "Always Available". The goal is that all power consumption in a data center becomes virtualized: data centers only pay for what they need to meet customer demand at any point in time. Data centers are treated as a single pool of resources (CPU cores, memory, I/O, and network capacity) that can be allocated and used according to need and location of the applications.

An added benefit of power virtualization is the ability to move computing on the fly. By decoupling virtualized software from the underlying hardware resources, the technology developed by PARC and Power Assure enables data centers to shift and shed computational resources to other locations in order to take advantage of service outages, demand response (DR) programs, or lower utility rates.

Power virtualization is made possible by applying PARC’s model-based control and optimization technology to virtualized data centers. A predictive model ensures adherence to service level agreements (SLAs) while consolidating applications on the smallest possible hardware footprint. In addition, the technology can prioritize resource assignments on the basis of quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Once the applications are consolidated, the Power Assure solution can put to sleep or shut down individual hardware or components and realize significant power savings. Similarly, if the software forecasts an increase in the computational load, the Power Assure solution can bring additional hardware resources online in order to guarantee SLAs.