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Eaton & IBM Combine Energy Management Capabilities To Offer Comprehensive View Of Data Center Environments

June 03, 2008 by Jeff Shepard

Eaton Corp. 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. This new integrated energy management offering is said to help customers control power consumption in their data centers to increase energy efficiency.

"Through this relationship, IBM 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 Dr. Kenneth Uhlman, Director of Data Center Business Development at Eaton. "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."

It is stated that 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. It is claimed that, 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 is said to offer 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."

This combined solution is said to create 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.

Eaton’s Power Xpert software is described as a comprehensive solution for enterprise-wide management of power infrastructures, regardless of equipment manufacturer, via Web-browser from one desktop, on one screen. It is said to remove 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.