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Power Assure CTO Predicts Top Trends on the Horizon in Data Center Energy Management

Santa Clara, Calif. - January 9, 2012 - Large enterprises, government agencies and managed service providers are struggling to deal with increased power demand, constrained capacity, and data center inefficiencies.  Most data centers have historically been built with an eye towards top performance and availability, with little attention paid to how efficiently the data center delivers on those promises. This is a costly operating model where all assets, including servers, lighting, and cooling are turned all the way on all the time.

Power Assure’s CTO Clemens Pfeiffer predicts that several major trends will occur over the next 3 – 5 years that will most critically impact how we utilize, manage and analyze energy in the data center.  These include:

• Companies will have their own private clouds and utilize public cloud services that will serve as spill-over capacity for rare peak capacity requirements.
• Companies will have multiple data centers around the globe to support a 15-20% CAGR of data center application capacity.
• The electric grid will become increasingly unstable and as a result, energy prices will increase dramatically, and fluctuate with grid conditions.
• Organizations will further combine and integrate IT and facility functions.
• Most data center operators will have a virtualized and load balanced infrastructure to allow applications to run in any of their data centers at any time.
• Applications will be able to run in any data center at any time, with applications grouped by service level priorities.
• The idle power consumption of IT equipment will be reduced further making the spread between idle and loaded power consumption much wider, causing unexpected power spikes for data centers.
• All aspects of monitoring and management will be pervasive across IT and facilities.
• Measuring power, temperature and utilization in real-time will be the norm.
• Because equipment energy consumption tracks more closely with utilization, idle and peak power consumption reference data will be required to maximize the capacity of a data center.
• Companies will have chief sustainability officers (CSOs) and require CO2 reporting to meet regulations and provide competitive advantage.
• Some companies will leverage application redundancy in favor of building tier 3 and 4 data centers.
• Companies will ask their data centers to participate in demand response and ancillary services to stabilize the utility grid and generate revenues from market participation, effectively funding the transition to private cloud services.

“During 2011, data centers became more virtualized as a first step towards a cloud-based architecture.  This began to reveal previously-hidden efficiency problems with both energy use and computing capacity,” said Pfeiffer.  “In 2012 this trend will continue and even accelerate, further elevating the need to understand the detailed utilization and power characteristics of IT and facility components inside data centers which will be necessary to maximize application capacity and reliability.”

About Power Assure (www.powerassure.com)

Power Assure is a leading developer of Data Center Energy Management software for large enterprises, government agencies, and managed service providers. Power Assure’s solutions provide visibility, intelligence, analytics and automation to help CIOs, IT directors, and facilities managers optimize capacity, service levels, and power consumption within and across data centers. Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, the company is privately held with funding from ABB Technology Ventures, Dominion Energy Technologies, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Good Energies, Point Judith Capital, and a grant from the Department of Energy. Power Assure partners include ABB, Cisco, Dell, IBM, Intel, In-Q-Tel, Raritan, UL and VMware.