White Paper

Dell Power Center’s Power Policies for 12
th
-Generation Servers
8
Power Capping a Group of Servers
Power Center can Aggregate the Data and Set the Power Capping at any Group
Level
Power Center can aggregate power data from servers to provide power monitoring and capping at any
group level. It provides both static and dynamic capping for a rack, aisle, room, an entire data center,
or any logical group. While power capping helps to limit power usage at any one point in time, it may
not reduce an energy bill if it takes longer to process the workload(s) on the throttled server(s); hence,
capping should be applied judiciously.
Static Capping
Static capping allows administrators to manually set the capping among the servers in a group. An
administrator can set the group capping and decide how to distribute the capping among the servers.
The capping value for each server will not be changed until the administrator changes it.
Figure 3 shows a group consisting of three servers. The left configuration shows the range of power
operation and capping value of each individual server. The configuration on the right shows how the
values are aggregated to the group level.
The power data is aggregated for group capping Figure 3.
Upper bound power 350W
:
Lower bound power 100W
:
Average power consumption 200W
:
Maximum power consumption 220W
:
Capping value 280W
Power supply maximum or face plate 500W
Upper bound power: 1050W
Lower bound power: 300W
:
Average power consumption: 600W
:
Maximum power consumption: 660W
:
Capping value: 840W
:
Power supply aximum or face plate 1500W
:
Figure 4 shows how static capping is displayed in Power Center. The administrator can set the
capping value for each server in the group. The default is an even distribution of power. All power-
related data and capping values can be set for several servers at a central console.