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Power Management in the cloud

 

During last UDS in Orlando, a few of us were attending the "Cloud Power
Management" session, led by Arnaud Quette.

Arnaud presented his project, called NUT (Network UPS Tools), which
provides support for the so called "power devices". These devices are
often, if not always, used in datacenters to feed power and provide
protection and runtime in case of power failures and other power events.

NUT is a modular and lightweight set of tools that provides support for
UPS, PDU and IPMI power supplies. 100s of manufacturers are supported,
on most OS (Linux, OS X, Windows, Unix) and architecture (x86, x86_64,
ARM). It offers tools and language binding to interface with NUT and
administer large scale setups.

Some of the scenarios painted at the session integrating NUT with
OpenStack:

- get visibility of power availability before deploying new VMs (ie,
which system is protected by which UPS, and should be preferred)
- remotely power on server, through PDUs outlets interaction,
- improve power efficiency and PUE, by selecting the best UPS to put new
loads (ie servers) on,

Cloud Power Management also implied Andres Rodriguez PowerWake /
PowerNap system, and its interaction with NUT, to improve general power
efficiency, and consolidate power management through a single interface.

Eaton, which is the 2nd largest power devices manufacturer, opensource
supporter and Arnaud's employer, also offered to provide devices for
development and testing purposes.

I would like to hear your opinion on the idea of adding knowledge of
power management to OpenStack: would you like to see this happening? Is
anybody interested in cooperating with Arnaud on a prototype? Other
ideas, use cases?

thanks,
stef



References:
- NUT: http://www.networkupstools.org/
- UPS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninterruptible_power_supply
- PDU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_distribution_unit
-
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/servercloud-p-cloud-power-management