Last week I was fortunate enough to sit down with Power Assure’s CTO and co-founder, Clemens Pfeiffer. Power Assure provides data center data center infrastructure and energy management tools, but their expertise with data centers carries far beyond just power management. Clemens spoke to me about how Power Assure can help any data center identify weaknesses and move to an energy efficient modern data center.
Power Assure can help CTOs identify a baseline of functionality and capability in their data centers. They provide monitoring, managing, analysis and automation for all types of data centers. The federal government has been mandated to lower their PUE (power usage effectiveness) to under 1.6. However, Clemens has worked with some customers with PUE ratios of over 3.
Clemens and I talked extensively on the future of data centers – where he sees them in 5 years, and how proper data center management can provide disaster relief, cybersecurity protection and overall peace of mind. Data center management starts at the power and resources required to run the data center and ends with computing cycle management and virtualization.
Instead of focusing on merely physical design, Clemens sees a movement to distributed, multi-data center virtualization as the data center architecture of the future. This design uses excess server resources to provide on-demand capabilities – without need for forklift upgrades. The distributed data center design allows for computing resources to be provided from many locations (preventing catastrophes or cybersecurity issues from shutting down operations). Distributing computing resources – yet making them available to centralized programming can enable a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to computing. If a certain data center location loses power – or the cost of energy goes up in that area, the virtualized server can be re-provisioned to draw resources from any other data center.
Today, Clemens and Power Assure are working with NASA to help their data center design. As one of the largest cloud providers in the federal government, NASA has huge data centers that need management and Power Assure is on the front lines of helping them move in line with government mandates.
If you have data centers that are a mess (or just want an audit to see where you stand), look to Power Assure to help you achieve your data center goals. Find them on the web here.
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