Eaton And IBM Combine To Offer Data Center Environments To Help Increase Efficiency

Eaton Corporation (News - Alert) today announced plans to combine IBM Tivoli service and energy management solutions with the facilities and environmental capabilities delivered by Eaton’s Power Xpert Software, Foreseer Class.

The new integrated energy management offering helps customers control power consumption in their data centers to increase energy efficiency, according to Kenneth Uhlman, director of data center business development at Eaton.

 

“Through this relationship, IBM (News - Alert) and Eaton have successfully brought Information Technology (IT) and facilities together into a virtualized data center. IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Green Energy provides real-time energy information and tools to allow users to manage and optimize data center and facility assets,” said Uhlman. “The combined strengths of the IBM and Power Xpert monitoring products offer a truly comprehensive view of the data center environment which introduces new capabilities for making strategic decisions on energy usage, service levels and workload throughput in the data center.”

 

The combined IBM and Eaton solution will place useful information into the hands of data center operators and facility managers, enabling more informed and intelligent decision-making for energy optimization. For the first time, data center managers have visibility that combines power consumption of IT computing resources such as servers and storage devices with energy-related events, power quality, historical trending and forecasting information. This information offers customers greater precision in data center and facility management.

 

“IBM and Eaton are working together to provide customers with the ability to monitor and manage power in data center and facility assets in order to help them improve the overall energy efficiency of their businesses,” said Stuart McIrvine, director, Emerging Markets, IBM Tivoli. “Customers can take advantage of this integrated solution to help proactively deal with rising power costs, maximize constrained data center and facility space and better plan for future energy consumption.”

 

The combined solution creates the ability to bring energy-awareness to other key aspects of service management. For example, this solution can be leveraged with Tivoli Business Service Management to illustrate the impact of energy consumption on business services, with IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager to determine who is consuming energy and how much is being consumed, or with IBM Maximo Enterprise Management to integrate energy and facilities management. These are just a few examples of the capabilities that can be unlocked with this solution to help increase energy efficiency in the data center.

 

Eaton’s Power Xpert software is a comprehensive solution for enterprise-wide management of power infrastructures, regardless of equipment manufacturer, via Web-browser from one desktop, on one screen. It removes the complexity of managing power systems by providing a clear picture of energy consumption and utilization at a component, device and enterprise level. Combined with IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Green Energy, Power Xpert Software, Foreseer Class gathers, presents and analyzes data center systems information in detail to identify opportunities for cost savings, downtime prevention and energy efficiency. For example, managers can easily reduce power consumption by diverting resources from idle equipment.

 

“Data center managers make difficult decisions about delivering more computing capacity to their businesses while taking into consideration increasing energy costs and constraints for data center expansion. IBM can help by offering optimized power and capacity planning, chargeback of energy usage and data center process automation,” added Uhlman.