Power IQ Energy Management Software Uses Automated Power Control, Analytics to Cut Power Consumption

Manages broad line of rack power distribution units, in-line meters

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Raritan has significantly enhanced its Power IQ data center energy management software to help companies better track and analyze energy usage down to the individual IT device and implement energy-saving actions anywhere in the enterprise from a central power console.

The new, expanded release of Power IQ serves as the single, central console for energy management and complete rack PDU (power distribution unit) management in data centers. In addition to gathering information from IT equipment plugged into Raritan's Dominion PX PDUs, Power IQ now also collects energy data from (and provides remote power control of) Ethernet-enabled rack PDUs from APC, Avocent, Cyber Switching, Geist, HP, MRV, and Server Technology.

Other energy-management activities enabled by Power IQ include:increasing a server room's ambient temperature gradually, creating energy cost bill-back reports to drive behavior, forecasting potential energy savings before decommissioning servers, and scheduling power usage at optimal times to qualify for energy rebates.

Visualizing and Reporting Energy Usage

Enterprise-wide data collection enables Power IQ's analytics to calculate and chart active power, energy consumption, cost, and carbon footprint for servers and other IT devices. Power information is presented in user-configurable graphs and reports that can be accessed from anywhere with Power IQ's Web-based dashboard. Graphs can easily depict which devices are consuming the most energy, whether power conservation efforts are working, and if there are hot spots or over-cooled areas.

Reports can be easily tailored to look at power over any user-defined time periods. In addition, trending reports and cumulative totals can be displayed at the data center, floor, room, rack, customer and IT device level.

Comprehensive Remote Power Control

Power IQ 1.4 provides easy and comprehensive device grouping and permission management. With a simple right-click command, users can control all outlets associated with a rack, IT device, or group of IT devices.

Power IQ's secure remote power control capabilities can be used to schedule power usage, such as automatically powering on or off certain device groups by day and time and by providing detailed reports on the energy savings. Device group power control also can help a data center manager extend battery life in the event of commercial power failure by turning off a non-critical device group. Users can also program to turn on all IT devices required for a specific Web service -- in configured order and with the required delays between devices.

Availability

Power IQ 1.4 is offered in two models -- a virtual appliance and a hardware appliance. The virtual appliance is tested to run on a customer's VMware platform, saving rack space, energy, and hardware costs. The hardware appliance is a turnkey solution on an enterprise-class server. More information is available at www.raritan.com.

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