As industrial computing moves to cloud-based solutions, power saving has come to the forefront as a major consideration for all companies and organizations. With our efforts to increase energy efficiency, thus reducing costs and damage to the environment, ADLINK has developed the Embedded Power Management Agent (EPMA), an integrated software package that monitors and effectively manages power consumption on the latest ADLINK x86 boards to enable green computing.
With ADLINK EPMA, users can set power limits on ADLINK server boards, allowing maximized rack density with confidence that the rack power budget will not be exceeded. During a power or thermal emergency, EPMA software can intelligently limit server power consumption and extend service uptime. EPMA also provides an interface to collect power and thermal statistics of ADLINK server boards, providing crucial information for big data analysis, and helping to improve the power supply and cooling design of the server facility.
EPMA leverages IntelR Node Manager Technology, proprietary hardware design and enhanced BIOS/IPMI firmware to enable a suit of policy-based power management features. When a power policy is configured and activated, EPMA will take average power consumption or temperature readings over a predefined period and use power controls provided by BIOS routines to limit power consumption to meet policy-defined budgets. If these controls do not meet the targets set by a particular budget within the defined time limit, a user-configured exception action will be taken (e.g. "send alert" or "shutdown").
EPMA implements a closed control loop that:
Monitors platform power consumption and inlet air temperature
Collaborates with IntelR Node Manager and BIOS to maintain power consumption at pre-defined budgets
Takes exception action when a power budget cannot be met within time limits
Stores exception events for external management software polling
Customers can select multiple EPMA clients (Open source IPMItool, IntelR Datacenter Manager or AMIR XMSR) to set a power limit policy. Definable policy parameters include "Power or Temperature Budget", "Correction Time Limit", "Suspend Period", and "Action on Exception".
The following table presents two typical power management scenarios using ADLINK EPMA.
| Scenarios |
Node Manager Policy |
Example policy settings |
| Cost Savings
Run systems at lower power consumption limit during high energy cost periods; no power limits during low energy cost periods. |
Limit node power consumption with no policy trigger. |
"Set power consumption limit to 200W";
"Suspend power consumption limits between 10pm and 6am". |
| Thermal Restrictions
Run systems with higher inlet air temperatures at reduced power without tripping system thermal limits; alert datacenter console.
|
Reduce node power consumption when triggered by inlet air temperatures. |
"When inlet air temperature exceeds 40°C, set power consumption limit to 200W and alert datacenter console";
"When inlet air temperature exceeds 50°C, set power consumption limit to 160W and alert datacenter console". |