APC by Schneider Electric, a global leader in integrated critical power and cooling services, has announced a new version of InfraStruxure management software, a core feature of APC’s InfraStruxure architecture, which provides an open, vendor neutral management platform for data centre physical infrastructure. New features help companies conserve energy and cut costs by delivering active, open, management across all key domains of the data centre, including power, cooling, rack systems, and security systems. Utilisation of InfraStruxure management software has become imperative for IT managers in order to avoid unplanned downtime and to maximise energy efficiency. With full integration capabilities with enterprise and building management systems, the software provides a core platform to monitor and manage data centre assets. “More than ever, businesses are looking to maximise energy efficiency and minimise the complexity of their data centre operations. We updated our InfraStruxure management software to provide not only critical monitoring and measurement but extensive operational upgrades to enable seamless implementation of virtualisation and the reduction of overall carbon footprints,” says Soeren Brogaard Jensen, Vice President Enterprise Software, APC by Schneider Electric. “By using APC’s InfraStruxure Management Suite, IT managers can finally implement virtualisation without worrying about whether their physical infrastructure can support the nomadic loads. These upgrades allow customers to maximise current resources, conserve energy and better plan for the future.”

The new features of APC’s InfraStruxure management software portfolio enable IT managers to change the way they monitor, operate, manage and maintain their data centres through the integration of new virtualisation capabilities and upgraded energy efficiency and operations software.

One of the enhanced capabilities include,  the new Data Center Lab application within InfraStruxure Capacity, a data centre project management tool, which enables the design of new data centre build-outs or upgrades. This new functionality allows users to simulate changes and scenario planning without impacting data centre operations. Data Center Lab’s drag and drop functionality and instant feedback on the impact of adding new IT gear makes the tool ideal for the creation of blueprint design proposals including floor layouts, rack layouts and inventory lists for data centre expansion, consolidation or new build projects.
InfraStruxure Capacity’s is another capability updated Impact Analysis application provides an instant overview of data centre physical infrastructure operations including UPS, power distribution and cooling, independent of the types and brands of equipment present in the data centre. This application is uniquely able to alert an IT manager when a temperature or other physical infrastructure-related event has occurred that could potentially impact the individual IT equipment. Vendor-agnostic inventory management and real-time device failure notifications are shown within physical data centre layouts. These capabilities, available within InfraStruxure Operations 6.1 Capacity Manager, allow for the setting of thresholds, management of efficiencies, custom reporting and automated recommendations on how to resolve critical issues including the migration of virtual machines.
Through InfraStruxure Efficiency 1.1, IT managers can quickly and easily report on monthly energy consumption of their data centre subsystems including CO2 emissions, PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and DCIE (Data Centre Infrastructure Efficiency). Carbon footprint and energy costs are user configurable or can be automatically calculated to correlate with local power generation CO2 emission and local public utility data, providing a more accurate representation of emissions and energy costs.
The new network management tool within InfraStruxure Capacity provides insight into equipment dependencies including mapping and documenting fibre and copper networks from servers, via patch panels, to switches or routers, allowing IT managers to document connectivity, manage their network structure and plan and control network usage.

An example of the increased integration capabilities of the software includes the real-time communication between InfraStruxure Operations 6.1 with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 via a PRO Pack. This new capability automatically migrates virtual machines to healthy, secure host server environments and provides visibility into how virtual machines relate to physical servers. Additionally, InfraStruxure Operations ensures Virtual Machine Manager is aware of critical physical infrastructure alarms and events, including power, cooling, security and environment, and can execute corrective actions to move virtual machines to non-impacted areas within the data centre.

With these new features, InfraStruxure management software enables IT managers to align capacity with demand at row, rack, and server levels; monitor the data centre physical infrastructure with instant status notifications and alarms; and reduce non-IT power consumption and wasteful excess capacity in order to increase overall data centre efficiency. Furthermore, as a vendor-neutral software suite, APC’s InfraStruxure management software enables monitoring and management of physical infrastructure equipment as well as integrations with enterprise and building management systems by a range of vendors.