Measure Dell M1000e and M600 Power Consumption

“Going green” is popular these days.  Whether your organization is buying into the movement for social or financial reasons, you’ll still need to measure your success.  Dell’s new M1000e chassis and M600 blade servers have built-in methods to get power information.  Scott Lowe explains.

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Green IT is the phrase of the day and reducing the “footprint” is the social goal for many organizations.  Being able to accurately measure actual power consumption is an important part of the analysis of an organization’s power usage.  Power supply readings are a start, but generally not accurate for actual usage as their listed figures are static and don’t take into consideration differing workloads between identical servers.

Dell’s new M1000e chassis ships with Chassis Management Controller software that provides a real-time look at how much power is being consumed by the chassis and the individual blades within the chassis.  Although the software doesn’t provide a look at the power usage for each individual module in the back of the chassis, the software does tell you how much total power is being used by the chassis’ infrastructure components which include everything in the chassis except the individual blade servers.

Dell M1000e Power Consumption

Dell M1000e Power Consumption 2

You can also monitor power consumption at the individual server level where you can get cumulative power information; that is, a look at how much total power an individual blade server has consumed since being put into service.  At the individual server level, you’re also provided with peak watt and amp information, which can be useful when planning changing to your electrical systems.

An Individual Blade’s Power History

This granular look into chassis and blade power makes it very easy for you to track how much energy is being used by the servers in your data center.