HANNOVER, Germany, March 15 /PRNewswire/ -- CeBIT/APC Stand C37, Hall 15 -- APC today unveiled its plans to focus on delivering high value enterprise software solutions for efficient management of company-wide IT physical infrastructure including floor space, power, cooling, cabling and threat protection. In support of its enterprise software strategy APC also unveiled InfraStruXure Central v4.0, a redesigned platform for the integration and deployment of intelligent enterprise management applications. InfraStruXure Central lowers support costs and prevents downtime through rapid problem resolution of physical and environmental issues.
"These new tools are an essential element of building an Efficient Enterprise(TM)," said Dr. Phil London, APC's vice president of Software and Management Solutions. "The data center of the future must be fully integrated, fully managed and fully scalable. These are mandatory principles from concept to commissioning, from operation to obsolescence."
Building on years of investment in software for APC's line of PowerChute(R) UPS control solutions, intelligent product configurators and complex data center design tools, APC is developing an integrated suite of applications that allow IT and data center professionals to manage the entire lifecycle of their physical infrastructure. The unique architecture combines the outputs from an automated data center design application with real-time monitoring and measuring applications and, also, with ITIL service management applications to deliver previously unavailable integration and effectiveness in IT physical infrastructure management.
InfraStruXure Central v4.0 is a critical element in managing today's IT physical infrastructure. Its base configuration includes device management, alerting and reporting. The system easily scales from simple wiring closet monitoring to full enterprise management of data centers and remote facilities. InfraStruXure Central v4.0 supports most IT devices regardless of manufacturer. Additional applications can easily be enabled to provide centralized environmental monitoring, video surveillance, rack and data center access control, and ITIL-based Capacity and Change Management. The system includes preloaded software on a high performance appliance designed for high reliability, serviceability and expandability. A suite of models fits any IT environment.
"InfraStruXure Central v4.0 gives us a new level of visibility and control," said Bill Hodges, director of data center operations at Sisters of Mercy Health System in Chesterfield, Missouri. "Information systems infrastructure is a critical element in our ability to deliver the highest quality health care. InfraStruXure Central provides both the monitoring tool and the management reporting required to maintain the infrastructure foundation of our environment. With APC's InfraStruXure Central we have the ability to establish and define our event alerting structure that includes threshold setting, escalation intervals and crisis event reactionary time allowing us to proactively resolve areas of risk or address interruptions before they become service outages."
Today's InfraStruXure Central announcement marks the first of many new APC products planned to address the challenges created by increased power costs, heat produced by high density server architectures, greater uptime requirements and the need for more agile delivery of new services by IT departments.
"With InfraStruXure Central as the core platform, we have a great base on which to continue to build," said London. "We are delivering the industry's first closed loop system. You can only eliminate inaccuracies by combining design, operation and management. APC is now well-positioned to manage the entire physical layer of a data center through its lifecycle, seamlessly."
Not only are devices monitored and capacities measured within the IT physical infrastructure, but by integrating data from APC's design tools, IT managers can compare what is actually happening to what is supposed to happen. This design and operations data can then be fed to a new capacity management application. Capacity Manager helps eliminate the guesswork of where to place that next server with respect to power, cooling, floor and rack space. Stranded power and cooling capacity is eliminated and space is utilized to its highest efficiency. The new change management application allows easy management and tracking of the workflow and movement of IT equipment. All information from the change and capacity management applications is fed back to the database creating a closed loop system which ensures an updated, accurate model.
APC's InfraStruXure Designer, the result of more than 100 man years of development, provides the design data in the new solution. A sophisticated software system, InfraStruXure Designer provides the most efficient data center layout incorporating power and cooling, as well as floor and rack space. Its intelligence enables a design to incorporate redundancy, model the loads of thousands of different IT devices and even generate 3D visual renderings. The use of advanced power capacity and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling ensures the physical infrastructure design avoids costly over-sizing, while providing the flexibility of a scalable infrastructure to meet the current and future needs of IT department's servers, storage and networking IT equipment.
"With today's high density computing, everything has become extremely complex," added London. "It is now clear that the days of managing the data center by hand are over."
InfraStruXure Central v4.0 is available worldwide and starts with an estimated resale price of less than $10,000. InfraStruXure Designer is currently available worldwide as a no charge service. For more information about InfraStruXure Central v4.0 and APC's other products, please visit www.apc.com or call 800-877-4080.
About APC APC, a leading provider of global, end-to-end solutions for real-time infrastructure, recently combined with MGE UPS SYSTEMS to form the Critical Power and Cooling Services business unit of Schneider Electric. Founded in 1981, APC's comprehensive products and services for home and corporate environments improve the availability, manageability and performance of sensitive electronic, network, communication and industrial equipment of all sizes. APC offers a wide variety of products for physical infrastructure including InfraStruXure(R), its revolutionary architecture for on-demand data centers, as well as physical threat management products through the company's NetBotz(R) division. These products and services help companies increase the availability and reliability of their IT systems. For more information on APC or MGE, please visit www.APC-MGE.com.
