Virtual Power Systems, a stealth Silicon Valley startup with a solution that automates data center power management, has raised about US$1.3m in equity financing from undisclosed investors.

The company reported the raise in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, first spotted by the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

The company's solution is called ICE, which stands for Intelligent Control of Energy. Using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), the system controls servers through power and communication networks and communicates with data center management software, according to the company's website.

The pitch revolves around fine-grain choice of server, rack or data center for an application that is most efficient in terms of power. The company claims it can assure Tier IV-like redundancy without all the physical components the Uptime Institute requires for Tier IV certification.

According to the website, Virtual Power is currently recruiting companies for trials.

The company's founding team has a strong combination of business and engineering experience.

Its CEO and founder is Shankar Ramamurthy, a long-time tech executive with numerous CEO stints on his resume, according to his LinkedIn profile. In the early '90s he led corporate development for the Indian IT consulting giant Wipro.

Denis Kouroussis, founder of the smart-grid power-management startup Volta Entergy, is workign as VP of technology at Virtual Power. Kouroussis is also executive consultant to the data center power-management company Power Assure.

Virtual Power's director of engineering is Milind Kukanur, who has held jobs at EMC, AMD and Wind River, the Berkeley-founded developer of operating systems and middleware for embedded systems bought by Intel in 2009 for $884m.