Posts Tagged ‘metered power datacenter’
LogicalSolutions.net’s Power and Bandwidth Portal
LogicalSolutions.net is the only Rochester Data Center and one of only a few across the country providing metered power to our customers. All of our colocation customers have access to our Power and Bandwidth Portal located within the Client Billing Portal. If you are on a metered Bandwidth and/or metered Power plan, you would be able to track your usage here.
To get to the portal, you will need to login with your email address and password at http://portal.logicalsolutions.net/billing/. Once you successfully login, you will need to click on the “My Services” tab as shown below:
On the next screen, you will see all of the services that we are providing for you. Next, you will need to click on the green arrow to the right of the appropriate service as shown below:
Once you click on this button, you will be placed into the “Client Area” for this service. If your colocation service includes metered Bandwidth and/or metered Power, you should see something similar to the image below on this page:
From here, you can look at current and historical data. The following is what your portal may look like:
If you have any difficulty finding this area within your Client Portal, please contact support.
View Comments →Insist on Metered Power in your next Data Center!
How would you like to buy the power you use at your home – pay for how much you use, or pay for the absolute maximum that you could possibly need each month? I have a hunch you answered “Pay for just what I use”, right? So why would you rent space in a data center and not pay the exact same way? Yet still today a majority of all data centers will charge you a flat fee for each electric circuit that you need.
Here is the most typical example if you would allow me to get a little technical on you for just a second: You decide that colocation is a smart option for your company. You find a data center that you trust and rent a full cabinet for all of your servers. Your sales rep tells you that each one comes with one (1) 20amp circuit – just like the ones you have in your home or office, it is a standard US plug that can handle 20 amps of electricity flowing through it at 120 volts. (The first circuit is baked into the initial price of the cabinet) You plug in 8 servers, and your IT team tells you that they need another circuit for the 9th server which costs you $250/month. Yes – that is correct – you have to pay a full $250/month to get that 9th server running, even though you will only be needing about 2 amps of the 2nd 20amp circuit.
Doesn’t make sense? The answer is pretty simple – find a data center that offers revenue grade metered power, and pay for just what you use. I can assure you that you will save much more money in the long run, here is how:
- If you have the same cabinet in a newer data center with metered power, the base cabinet fee will be less expensive by at least a few hundred dollars a month.
- With Metered power you will only pay for what you use. 99% of the time this will be well under what older traditional data centers charge for fixed price circuits which must cover their costs under full/maximum load.
- If you are running dual power supplies in your equipment, you should always have them on separate circuits. BUT (and this is important) you have to allow for each one not to exceed 50% capacity in case one power supply or circuit fails. Yes – this means that in a true high availability design, you can never load your circuits more than 50% each which means even more money wasted when paying for flat fee circuits. In this configuration, pay-per-Kwh does not penalize you for proper design.
- When you see, monitor and pay for power by exactly what you use, your awareness goes up and you end up becoming smarter in your hardware purchases by buying more energy efficient servers, etc. – in other words, you are participating in making your portion of the data center more efficient.
- Lastly, data centers that actively monitor power usage are going to be more efficient in their equipment choice and design, and you will end up having these savings passed on to you.
In summary – power is now the biggest cost in any data center, and that is passed on to you. By only paying for what you use, you will save money as well as help shift the IT world towards more green & energy efficient computing! Want to know more on this? Feel free to email me directly. Also watch for my next part in this series on real time energy efficiency monitoring in your next data center.
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