IBM mainframes report actual energy use

Stephen Withers
Friday, 12 October 2007 12:04

Your IT - Home IT

Ever wondered just how much power your servers are consuming, and how that relates to workloads? If you're part of the Green IT revolution, you probably have.

A new facility for IBM's z9 mainframe reports the actual energy and cooling statistics as collected by internal sensors, and these figures can be used to reveal trends or correlated with the work done.

Another tool in the suite helps predict the effect of configuration changes on energy use. Adding an Integrated Facility for Linux (a CPU dedicated to running Linux and therefore exempt from per-processor pricing schemes for System z software) can increase consumption by as little as 20 watts, according to IBM officials.

IBM is summarising energy consumption data from around 1000 customer systems to compile an average watts-per-hour figure as called for by a recent EPA report. The company claims it is the first vendor to provide such information to customers.

"A single mainframe running Linux may be able to perform the same amount of work as approximately 250 x86 processors while using as little as two to ten percent of the amount of energy," said IBM green consultant David Anderson.