GURGAON, INDIA: To improve operational and energy efficiency in datacenters, Raritan has announced systems integration capabilities to its Power IQ datacenter energy management software and support for more datacenter equipment.

Power IQ helps companies track and analyze energy usage down to the individual IT device level and implement energy-saving actions from a central power console.

Power IQ's new Web Services APIs-Power Control API and Configuration Item API enable customers to integrate Power IQ with their existing enterprise systems, such as HP Asset Management, as well as build custom tools. A customer, for example, can write Web service scripts to automate power control to support their unique operational needs.

“Power IQ enables customers to manage their datacenters smarter,” said Sanjay Motwani, Regional Manager-India and Middle-East, Raritan, adding, “Now with the new Web services APIs, we provide customers a way to implement their creative ideas to manage their enterprise power."

At North Carolina-based WebAssign, for example, Power IQ is helping the company reduce costs and manage its datacenter with less resources.

“Power IQ allows me to manage and forecast easily my power needs in the datacenter for optimal efficiency and uptime,” said Matt Pusateri, Systems Administrator, WebAssign.

“I can also look in one place to obtain energy usage reports and to do firmware upgrades of our Raritan intelligent rack PDUs-rather than having to visit each PDU individually. Additionally, the centralized aggregation of my power consumption will be invaluable in planning future datacenters, and analyzing future power needs,” he added.

The new release of Power IQ also supports deployments upto 5,000 rack PDUs, making it the most scalable Energy Management Virtual Appliance in the market. In addition to collecting data from Dominion PX's environmental sensors for analyzing rack temperature and humidity information, Power IQ now collects data from ServerTech rack PDU probes and NetBotz.

Power IQ also gathers power information on IT equipment connected to 'not-so-smart' PDUs using Raritan's Dominion PX-3000 inline power meters, which are designed to be used in conjunction with dumb rack PDUs to provide comprehensive strip-level metering on all types of IT equipment. Power IQ recently achieved VMware certification and is designated as 'VMware Ready'.

Many customers deploy Power IQ as a virtual appliance because it helps save rack space, energy and hardware costs. Power IQ is also offered as a hardware appliance.

Enterprise-wide data collection at the device level 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.

Remedial steps such as scheduling devices to turn off for periods when not needed or increasing a server room's ambient temperature gradually can be made easily using Power IQ's remote power management capabilities.