It is no Fluke

Missed blogging on this topic the last two weeks, but had a really good excuse - probably the best one there is: I was at our Annual BMC User World event, with well over a thousand partners and customers across our various solutions. A great, informative and fun time was had by all!

While there, I took the opportunity to start "digging into" this issue with just a couple of our partners at the event, testing if they knew anything about this issue, if they had any ideas on how to further research it, and just generally spending a lot of time seeing if there were partner/vendor interest. Every customer I discussed this problem with was highly intrigued!

Most interested partner goes to Sun, perhaps not surprisingly since they own a current market(ing) advantage in terms of "greener servers" (see my earlier blog entry on SWaP, etc.). The technical gentleman at the Sun Demo pod (Spod?) noted they take advantage of the AMD API: PowerNow...  and suggested I look into it. So off I went to research just what that would allow.

After digging around both Sun (for Solaris) and Microsoft webpages, I came to the conclusion that none of them (separately or in combination) allow for a software way (from the Operating system via kernel calls or other APIs) to actually measure power over time. Easiest route to solve the problem is exhausted (for now!)... Time to check the HW platform angle some more...

Exploring the Intel angle just a bit further, I tripped across an in depth whitepaper exploring the relationships between CPU interrupts (over time) and power consumed by the CPU.  It was herein that I discovered the way that Intel measures power over time (at least for this whitepaper):

They use HW data acquisition equipment from Fluke. Now, I remember Fluke from way back in my EE days in the 70's, so it wasn't hard to veer down that thread (or have an inkling of where it'd lead, unfortunately).  Here's what I found:

The Fluke NetDAQ* 2686 has the ability to acquire and measure things like power over time, but requres hardware probes on all the device(s) that you want to measure power consumption across.

This is NOT what I'm looking for!  We can't require IT to go around hooking wirest to each/every one of their CPU boards/Blades in order to just measure what is going on! Think of the tangle in a fairly typical data center with a couple thousand CPU/Blades! Think of the potentials for ground-loops causing crashes. And just think about getting permission to physically instrument production servers.  Simply put, not gonna happen!

Next Step? Gotta dig into the bowels of the hardware. First stop (for today!), the Intel IPMI Specification. Over 650 pages of reading guaranteed to make any EE/Software guy's eyes glaze over... After a couple of hours reading, my current conclusion.  Intel has an API to query status of just about everything... but NOT power consumption! Argh... Time to find humans inside Intel (get it? - haha) to ask my detailed questions...

Wish me LUCK! Without this type of instrumentation, well, lets just say, again - you can't manage what you can't measure!

Stay tuned for next update

Dave