APC Journal

"Energy availability and consumption is now a major consideration in ongoing IT operations support," said John Webster, senior analyst with Illuminata, an analyst firm specializing in mission-critical infrastructure. "This hardware-agnostic market pairing is exactly the sort of relationship building we need in the IT energy conservation space," he continued, referring to the teaming up of APC by Schneider Electric and CA.

APC by Schneider Electric and CA have announced a partnership that will provide enterprise customers a fully integrated solution set for assessing and fully optimizing their data center energy consumption. APC will offer assessment services, integration services, and physical layer management software. CA will provide enterprise-level monitoring and management software and related services solutions.

High energy costs and contracting budgets are making it increasingly important for companies to operate their data centers more efficiently. Energy costs, now about 10 percent of the average IT budget, could rise to 50 percent in a matter of years unless companies take radical measures. As of 2006, the electricity use attributable to the nation's servers and data centers is estimated at about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. Due to escalating needs, this number is expected to increase. There are multiple efforts underway to reduce costs and conserve energy, but these all rely on the simple fundamental understanding of which systems are generating current demand and where there is capacity available. The combination of APC's devices and CA's ability to aggregate data provides new levels of insight to support this critical market need.

APC's global Professional Services organization has experience in all aspects of data center energy modernization. The APC Professional Services team audits existing data centers and advises customers with detailed plans for improvements to the physical infrastructure including power management and cooling solutions. APC's vendor-neutral management software, InfraStruXure Central, includes the ability to monitor devices such as temperature sensors, video, thermal, and other innovative technologies. When combined with APC's Capacity Manager, customers will gain the additional capability to perform predictive simulation of changes to the data center to understand the impact on the power and cooling infrastructure before deployment.

CA's eHealth Network Performance Manager (NPM) has been enhanced to manage data center power equipment, HVAC systems, fuel consumption, and other devices such as the thousands of temperature sensors needed to monitor individual rack temperatures. CA eHealth NPM has a history of managing millions of IT assets worldwide. The product proactively pinpoints service degradations to enable corrective action before they affect users and business processes. When used with APC's InfraStruXure Central, the enhancements to CA eHealth NPM will allow for the capture and integration of data from non-IT devices, providing improvements in the ability to monitor and manage the energy consumption of these complex systems.