APC Tries to Make Data Center Design Easier

By Jeff Feinman

June 2, 2008 —  Data center company APC has focused on helping professionals experience an easy path in creating facilities with a number of new initiatives.

APC said today that it will integrate its APC and TAC software management platforms with IBM’s Tivoli energy management software. The integration will allow APC’s InfraStruXure Central management platform and TAC’s building management system to share alarm notifications, historical data and asset tracking information with Tivoli, according to APC. This will improve visibility and control for managing data centers and maintain IT service levels.

APC executives said that with the integration, administrators will be able to view and correlate dependencies of business processes and IT assets to the underlying physical infrastructure. One of the things customers will be able to do, APC said, is determine the best location of IT assets if they want to move an application to a different rack or data center. They will have information about energy use, cooling and power availability to help them decide where to move the application.

Additionally, APC released TradeOff Tool, which is a Web-based application designed to simplify the decision-making involved in constructing data centers. The company said that TradeOff Tool allows data center managers experiment with different scenarios regarding virtualization, power sizing and other data center features.

TradeOff Tools that are now available include a carbon calculator that illustrates how data center changes can impact carbon dioxide, an energy efficiency calculator and a capital cost calculator. The capital cost calculator identifies key physical infrastructure parameters and views redundancy and density characteristics to project the amount of racks and floor space required in the data center.

APC has made available graphs of what it calls “energy efficiency data” on its Web site. The data provided helps data center professionals predict the performance of the overall system, according to the company.



Related Search Term(s): Data centers, power, Tivoli, APC, IBM

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