Here are a few tips to follow when power planning:

• Always get dual power supplies for your servers, it doesn’t cost much more to purchase these and it’s worth the extra money.
• Always plug dual power supplies into separate UPS’ and plug the UPS’ into separate circuits. There is no point plugging them into the same UPS and/or circuit. This gives you a single point of failure and basically defeats the purpose of having two power supplies in the first place.
• Power strips for racks with readouts for the amount of amps being drawn are great for seeing how much of a load your are placing on circuit. Many different companies sell these.
• A cheap meter for measuring the draw on a piece of equipment can be your best friend in troubleshooting issues. Sometimes a large enough power spike during boot up can trip a breaker and you can use a meter to determine what’s going on.
• Use an online power calculator before your installation day to determine how many circuits, UPS’, power cords, etc. you will need for all of your equipment. Then budget accordingly. It can be quite embarrasing if you don’t think about this beforehand and you get stuck up the creek without a paddle on the implementation day.
• If you are worried about increased power costs, look into blade systems and virtualization. The amount of money and energy you can save is quite substantial.
• Do some reading on electricity if you don’t understand all the terms. There are plenty of resources out there on the web.

-RP

It is quite often I will see server rooms filled with racks and racks of servers with no heed paid to virtualization at all. A lot of people believe it or not, still haven’t even heard of it as they are busy focusing on other things in their business and don’t keep their ear to the ground in the IT world. It’s at times like these that I like to point out the benefits of virtualization.

You can easily take an HP C3000 blade enclosure (this enclosure, aka the “shorty” is targeted at the SMB market) and fill it with server blades, a tape blade and a storage blade, and consolidate racks worth of servers down into 6U of space. Then you can install VMWare ESX Server on the server blades and potentially have tons of virtual machines per blade server. If you haven’t looked into these technologies lately I suggest you do, they are the next big thing in IT and have just been getting better and better.

 By doing this you can save your company money on power, thermal, physical space constraints, and sheer amount of servers and racks you have to buy. Also by implementing VMWare on a blade enclosure, you increase the level of redundancy you have greatly over what you would typically have in standard configuration of one server installation per rack mounted server by taking advantage of the features available to you in VMWare and in the blade enclosure.

 -RP