APC has agreed to integrate its InfrastruXure Central monitoring suite with management and data center automation software from enterprise software giant CA as part of a broader services offering tackling data center energy use.
APC will offer assessment services, integration services and physical layer management software. CA will provide enterprise-level monitoring and management software and related services solutions.
John DiPippo, APC's senior vice president of Data Center Solutions, Services, and Software, said: "APC will not only help our joint customers with the integration of physical layer assets in the data center, but we can help them to better manage these assets as well. When combined with CA's Infrastructure Management and Data Center Automation solutions, enterprise customers will have the capability to connect physical layer information to the dependent business processes enabling active energy management across their data center."
Energy costs, now about 10 percent of the average IT budget, could rise to 50 percent in a matter of years unless companies take radical measures. As of 2006, the electricity use attributable to US servers and data centers is estimated at about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption.

InfraStruXure Central is being combined with APC's Capacity Manager meaning customers can perform predictive simulation of changes to the data center to understand the impact on the power and cooling infrastructure before deployment. "Energy availability and consumption is now a major consideration in ongoing IT operations support," said John Webster, senior analyst with Illuminata, an analyst firm specializing in mission-critical infrastructure. "This hardware-agnostic market pairing is exactly the sort of relationship building we need in the IT energy conservation space."
APC is owned by Schneider Electric.