Some new tools...power calculators and Sun Sim Datacenter
In case you didn't know. There are a couple of new tools available for looking at some of the "eco-impact" of systems.
The first is a set of power calculators for a few of Sun's newest
systems. The Opteron x64 based systems X4100, & X4200 and the
CoolThreads Sun Fire T2000 server. The links are below.
X4100 calc
X4200 calc
T2000 calc
You can select from a range of options for each server including # of
CPUS, # of DIMMS & what density 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, # of internal disk
drives, PCI cards, and # of power supplies.
It will give you watts used & BTU/HR generated. (The x64 also gives
you HVAC tons, but, I wouldn't use that as a hard and fast rule as it
does not take into account the HVAC efficiency of your data center.)
I found these calulators fast, easy to use, and helped out with a bit
of power/HVAC capacity planning I was doing this week. (And as I mentioned
in a previous entry, one of the first keys to better data center
efficiency is getting useful data.)
Now the other tool that was recently released was Sun Sim Datacenter.
More info and downlod of Sun Sim Datacenter here
Its not a full CFM (computational fluid-dymanic modeling) ala Flovent (http://www.flomerics.com/flovent/
) but, it gives you the ability to build a different racks and look at
what the power/space/cooling requirements are and how you could arrange them in your data center. (If they would have included system weight it would be a perfect graphical view tool of the RLU methodology found in
my data center design book, (Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology) I am gonna try to get them to add weight field to the sim.
The other big advantage to Sim Datacenter is you can build your own racks
full of stuff, so you can customize it to your particular requirements and equipment.
None of them is the be all and end all, but, they are pretty darn useful and the price is right...FREE!!!!!!!!!
Check them out, you may find them quite useful.
Posted at
01:04PM Mar 16, 2006
by rdsesq in Sun |