Cloud Data Center China Mobile Communications Corporation Increasing Server Efficiency and Eliminating Costly Hardware Case Study

Intel® Data Center Manager delivers significant savings by optimizing server utilization, and lowering annual server replacement percentages Business: China Mobile Communications Corporation is the largest mobile telecom provider in China. Challenges • Server power and thermal health monitoring • Real time and historical data aggregation • Low utilization server detection • Energy optimization Solutions • Intel® Data Center Manager Executive Summary China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC), headquartered in Hong Kong, is the largest mobile telecom provider in China. The company installed Intel® Data Center Manager (Intel® DCM) and quickly deployed it across 50 servers to gain greater insight into energy consumption, server utilization, and component analysis across its server room environment. Additionally, Intel conducted a detailed discovery session of the company’s server environment to identify the specific pain points that DCM would address. The company currently operates over 1,000 servers in its test center. Leveraging Intel® DCM, CMCC wanted to better manage server health, balance loads more efficiently, analyze and remedy data center cooling issues, and gauge the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of multiple server models. The DCM solution provided CMCC’s IT operations team a cross-platform view of their four Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) server types with an enhanced ability to monitor the thermal health of each individual server component at the subcomponent level. Intel® DCM’s ability to deliver device-level power and thermal data eliminated the need to purchase intelligent Power Distribution Units (PDU), a significant source of cost savings. By not purchasing hardware sensors, the Intel® DCM deployment results across the full network of 100 data center racks indicated a five-year savings of $20,000 USD. The Intel® DCM console with real-time power monitoring capability provided the team with a list of idle or underutilized servers. Its remote management capability then allowed the team to power off underutilized servers from the convenience of their computer screens. This reduction in energy consumption over five years would yield an additional savings of $24,000 USD. Case Study | Intel® Data Center Manager Increases Server Network Efficiency and Eliminates Costly Hardware Purchases Figure 1. Intel® Data Center Manager Console Identifying underutilized servers also allowed them to replace EOL servers, as well as consolidate and virtualize underutilized servers, and would decrease 20 percent of their annual replacement costs over five years, yielding a savings of $120,000 USD. The combined efficiency improvement and savings from the deployment of Intel® DCM over the next five years indicated an overall savings of $164,400 USD. Background China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC) installed Intel® Data Center Manager (Intel® DCM) in a 50-server test deployment to gain greater insight into the facility’s thermal efficiency, server utilization, and component health across its server room environment. Intel conducted a detailed discovery session of the company’s server environment to identify the specific pain points that its DCM solution would address. The company currently operates over 1,000 servers in its test center. The Intel® DCM middleware web-service API integrates easily into existing management systems to monitor, manage and optimize the energy consumption and thermal health of its server operations. CMCC sought to take advantage of these features in DCM while remotely monitoring server nodes in its data center. IT staff installed Intel® DCM and began to compile and aggregate data from the servers. Through ease of use and cross-platform support, Intel® DCM enabled company IT staff to aggregate and visualize trend