Data Center Infrastructure Management is still a long way from being a complete solution, according to managers from Eaton's Power Quality Division.

And customers are still screaming out for levels of simplicity to help them overcome changes being seen between the IT and facilities roles within the data center.

Eaton's product manager for the Electrical Group Marcus Maxwell, who focuses on software and metering, and program manager Chris Loeffler, who works with Eaton's hardware, spoke with DatacenterDynamics after announcing the company was adding more virtual capabilities for PDU monitoring, following VMware's latest vCenter releases.

Its Intelligent Power Software Suite (IPSS) allows users to monitor and manage UPSs and connected equipment with a network monitoring card bundled with its UPS.

It is also drilling down into the hardware layer with updates for its Intelligent Power Manager, which allows for the monitoring of all power devices across the network from a single interface, as well as action live migration applications, transparently moving virtual machines to available servers on the network to help prevent downtime.

Maxwell said these solutions help solve some of the pain, but more needs to be done before all the challenges with monitoring are solved for the data center.

"One of the big problems today is that there are a lot of different pieces of software out there - building management systems, power management etc. People can't make sense out of it all because they don't have one system to get all their intelligence from, Maxwell said.

Loeffler said the challenge lies in integration.

"Integration is still not easy. It is evolving, and the good news is that standardization has been taking place over the last five years, in a speedy fashion. We are introducing communication protocols into the lower end of the products," Loeffler said.

"But the big problem is, you still have a lot of companies with ten or twenty-year-old stuff that they want to bring online."

He said companies are finding it easier to make use of monitoring and measuring technologies when they are starting with a greenfield site, but this is rarely the case. 

Loeffler said cloud computing is driving much of the demand for better management in the data center.

Eaton has been investing heavily into the area of virtualization and support with its Intelligent Power Manager with plugs in now available for all predominant virtualization systems.

"This is an ongoing process, and it is not only the software we are focussing on, it is a push on the virtualization and  understanding the impact of virtualization on all of the products. Everything we do has to be virtualization enabled," Maxwell said.