Tech Tip: You’ve got the power! Or do you…?

[marksimpkins]

HPE Power Advisor takes the guesswork out of adding “extras” to your server. Mark Simpkins shows you through its capabilities.

Have you ever wondered whether you are exceeding the power envelope by adding those extra hard drives, upgrading to max memory, and adding PCIe cards to your server? You don’t need to guess—HPE has a tool for you called HPE Power Advisor.

Covering a huge breadth of products from HPE ProLiant rack and tower servers to the HPC and AI behemoths that are HPE Apollo systems, to HPE storage solutions, there’s a wealth of capabilities here to guide you and take away the guesswork.

My HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus upgrades

I have a new base system with a quad-core processor, 16 GB DIMM, and one SSD. I wanted to add one SSD, two SATA hard drives, and another 16 GB DIMM. Keeping in mind that this server has an external 180W power supply, I needed to ensure the system could easily handle the extra requirements without issue—before I bought everything.

Doing this is simple: just select your input voltage, select your server, and use the “Config” button to reflect your desired configuration. I used a server utilization model of 80%, but you can scale that slider as you see fit.

Figure 1. Select your Server(s)

Figure 2. Build your configuration

Figure 3. Configuration summary on the right 

Figure 4. Generate a customized power report

While this may seem overkill for a small server like this, it did put my mind at ease before I spent my own money on the upgrades. For someone building out larger systems and data centers, this could be a crucial tool to avoid mistakes, and the power report can be helpful to visualize and predict power costs beforehand. I suggest you build out a sample system and bookmark the page for reference.

Try out HPE Power Advisor and please comment with any questions or feedback.

Mark Simpkins
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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