Technical Product Specification

Intel® Server Boards S4600LH2/T2 TPS
Revision 2.0
61
5.3 Intel
®
Intelligent Power Node Manager
Data centers are faced with power and cooling challenges that are driven by increasing numbers of servers
deployed and server density in the face of several data center power and cooling constraints. In this type of
environment, Information Technology (IT) needs the ability to monitor actual platform power consumption and
control power allocation to servers and racks in order to solve specific data center problems including the
following issues.
Table 19. Intel
®
Intelligent Power Node Manager
IT Challenge
Requirement
Over-allocation of power

Ability to monitor actual power consumption
 Control capability that can maintain a power budget to enable
dynamic power allocation to each server
Under-population of rack space
Control capability that can maintain a power budget to enable increased rack
population.
High energy costs
Control capability that can maintain a power budget to ensure that a set
energy cost can be achieved
Capacity planning

Ability to monitor actual power consumption to enable power usage
modeling over time and a given planning period
 Ability to understand cooling demand from a temperature and airflow
perspective
Detection and correction of hot spots
 Control capability that reduces platform power consumption to
protect a server in a hot-spot
 Ability to monitor server inlet temperatures to enable greater rack
utilization in areas with adequate cooling.
The requirements listed above are those that are addressed by the C602 chipset Management Engine (ME)
and Intel
®
Intelligent Power Node Manager (NM) technology. The ME/NM combination is a power and thermal
control capability on the platform, which exposes external interfaces that allow IT (through external
management software) to query the ME about platform power capability and consumption, thermal
characteristics, and specify policy directives (for example, set a platform power budget).
Node Manager (NM) is a platform resident technology that enforces power capping and thermal-triggered
power capping policies for the platform. These policies are applied by exploiting subsystem knobs (such as
processor P and T states) that can be used to control power consumption. NM enables data center power
management by exposing an external interface to management software through which platform policies can
be specified. It also implements specific data center power management usage models such as power limiting,
and thermal monitoring.
The NM feature is implemented by a complementary architecture utilizing the ME, BMC, BIOS, and an ACPI-
compliant OS. The ME provides the NM policy engine and power control/limiting functions (referred to as Node
Manager or NM) while the BMC provides the external LAN link by which external management software can
interact with the feature. The BIOS provides system power information utilized by the NM algorithms and also
exports ACPI Source Language (ASL) code used by OS-Directed Power Management (OSPM) for negotiating
processor P and T state changes for power limiting. PMBus*-compliant power supplies provide the capability to
monitoring input power consumption, which is necessary to support NM.
Below are the some of the applications of Intel
®
Intelligent Power Node Manager technology.
 Platform Power Monitoring and Limiting: The ME/NM monitors platform power consumption and
hold average power over duration. It can be queried to return actual power at any given instance. The
power limiting capability is to allow external management software to address key IT issues by setting a
power budget for each server. For example, if there is a physical limit on the power available in a room,
then IT can decide to allocate power to different servers based on their usage – servers running critical
systems can be allowed more power than servers that are running less critical workload.