White Papers

Using Power Manager Reports to Determine Power Costs
7 Using OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager for Chargeback
2 Using Power Manager Reports to Determine Power Costs
The primary focus of this paper is to determine the actual power consumed by servers and chassis inside a
datacenter and infer this data to identify the overall power costs for a data center.
After installing Power Manager on OpenManage Enterprise, a list of pre-canned or built-in reports are
available. There are two built-in reports to determine the power consumption of devices and groups monitored
through Power Manager— Power Manager: Power and Thermal Report of Devices and Power Manager:
Power and Thermal Report of Groups
For example, you can determine the power consumption of all devices being monitored by Power Manager for
the last month. Using the Power Manager: Power and Thermal Report of Devices report:
• Determine the power consumption for individual devices
• Consolidate power consumption of all devices
• And, aggregate the report data to find the total power consumption
Also, you can add the devices into a group and derive the same data using the Power Manager: Power and
Thermal Report of Groups. You can find more details about the second report in section
Pro-Rata Power
BudgetingRata Power Budgeting section.
Some points to note here before determining the power consumption are:
• If there are Modular chassis such as MX7000, M1000e, VRTX, FX2, FX2s present in your datacenter,
then adding up the power consumption on modular servers inside these chassis is redundant as the
chassis sensor accounts for all the components inside the chassis such as I/O modules, storage
sleds and so on. Therefore, exempt modular servers from this computation if the parent chassis is
included in Power Manager.
• For PowerEdge C series servers such as C6320, C6420 or C6525 their parent chassis C6400 is not
supported for monitoring and management with Power Manager, therefore include these servers in
Power Manager for computation of power consumption.
• This whitepaper accounts for device level power and cooling power consumption. The cost to cool
down a device is typically $0.5 per $1 spent on device power consumption.
• For CMCs such as M1000e, FX2, FX2s, and VRTX the total power consumption is calculated as
average power consumed by servers present in a chassis.
Change the Report Duration setting in Power Manager, to say 1 Month. For information about changing the
settings in Power Manager, see the Power Manager User’s Guide.