Advanced Power Management Features of the 12th Generation of Dell PowerEdge Servers

By Jeff Matthews, Sridevi Chandrasekaran, and Jeethendra Telagu of the Dell iDRAC Power team

Dell’s new 12th generation PowerEdge servers offer a rich set of new advanced power management features which are designed to help you monitor and manage power consumption, and, in-turn, control costs. The iDRAC7 supports all of the 11^th generation power monitoring and reporting capabilities in addition to advanced reporting and management capabilities listed below.

The iDRAC7 provides power monitoring/reporting and configuration feature such as:

• Power Control – Basic system power control actions

• Power Monitoring – Real-time and historical power consumption data
  • Tabular data and graphs, in both Watts and Amps
  • Minimum, Maximum, and Average power consumption over time
  • Peak and Instantaneous Headroom data
  • Cumulative power data over time
•  Power Inventory – Provides minimum and maximum expected consumption
  • Based on actual system component inventory
• Power Budgeting – Ability to control maximum power consumption of a server
  • Via processor and memory throttling
  • Ability to set time-of-day or real-time consumption based power policies via OMPC
• Power Supply Management – Information and configuration of power supplies on rack and tower servers
  • Redundancy
  • Hot Spare
  • Power Factor Correction
• OMPC Integration - Provides one-to-many console to monitor & control of power policies in the data center
• Multiple user interfaces
  • Most power management features are available through, iDRAC GUI, RACADM, Winrm, OpenWSMAN, IPMI, OMSA, and OMPC

The iDRAC7 maintains and stores cumulative power data and updates this cumulative information every second to provide the most up-to-date information available.  The cumulative power data is presented to the supported interfaces in numerical format and can be saved externally.  This cumulative data can be used to assess the power consumption over time.

The iDRAC7 also monitors Historical Peaks, Historical Trends, System Headroom, and Power Supply readings.  This information can be used to set an Active Power Policy accordingly to conserve power consumption.

In future posts, we’ll expand on each of these features in more detail.

• iDRAC7 User’s Guide   
• Dell iDRAC7 w/Lifecycle Controller Feature Guide on Dell TechCenter
• Dell iDRAC page on Dell TechCenter
• Dell Lifecycle Controller page on Dell TechCenter
• OpenManage Power Center on Dell TechCenter