MiserWare

Opsera Testimonial

Solutions Provider Controls Thermals

Opsera is the UK's leading open source software and technology services company. Opsera works with companies to translate their business requirements into a cost-effective enterprise architecture, develop their web and business applications and run and support their systems on an interim or on-going basis. In line with their business growth, Opsera's IT capacity has increased and their office development server centre was starting to suffer from thermal limitations. During beta testing, Opsera was able to reduce their thermals by about 24% using MiserWare MicroMiser and ServerMiser ES with no noticeable performance impact. Adrian Bridgett, infrastructure architect for Opsera had the following to say about the use of MiserWare products to resolve thermal issues they were facing.

"As we approached the capacity of our server room, we began experiencing a higher frequency of thermal emergencies. Thermal emergencies would cause systems that support our development efforts to shut down, requiring resubmission of active and pending jobs. We were consistently spending more time and effort resolving these issues. It got to the point that we were manually throttling and powering down machines to ensure thermal emergencies were avoided. This was a cumbersome and time consuming process and a major distraction for the infrastructure team.

We beta tested both the MiserWare MicroMiser software and the ServerMiser ES infrastructure. We found the installation of the software to be very easy as it followed common Linux software installation procedures. The packages were built as modules that were easy to install and uninstall as needed. The software was non-intrusive and worked well with our existing systems. We installed on a variety of systems including Etch and Lenny Debian both 32 and 64 Bit, and Ubuntu 32 and 64 Bit. The hardware itself consists of a variety of machines including Sun X2200s, Sun X2100s and Dell 2950s. The MiserWare software creates a database full of power savings data. Since we are familiar with the Nagios framework and the APIs for interacting with the database provided by MiserWare were open source, in about 30 minutes Neil Ferguson, one of our developers, was able to write a Nagios plugin that allowed us to visualize the power (and indirectly thermal) savings we were able to achieve (see Figure A).

Figure A: A screenshot of Neil Ferguson's Nagios plugin visualizing energy savings for his personal servers.

Our data center environments are heavily used for code development and sensitive to performance. We tried to use the power management daemons that come with Linux but found them tedious to get working properly, whereas MiserWare's software just worked. During the several months we have been running MicroMiser and ServerMiser ES we have not noticed any discernible performance loss. This ensures development proceeds efficiently.

We have used MiserWare products to reduce thermals in two key aspects. First, we can schedule minimal power consumption for select machines across our clusters enabling us to automate the thermal management process we were previously doing manually. For instance, we can set every other server to lower power consumption for certain periods throughout the day or when the room temperature is elevated. Second, during performance critical periods, we can set the policies to save maximum energy while maintaining performance. These products have allowed us to minimize the amount of time and effort our engineers have to devote to thermal management while ensuring we maximize the performance efficiency of our server room."