iTRACS and Power Assure Team Up on DCIM Offering

Data center infrastructure management provider iTRACS has collaborated with Power Assure for an integrated DCIM solution. It combines Power Assure’s PAR server performance metrics with iTRACS’ open systems Converged Physical Infrastructure Management (CPIM) in an integrated DCIM suite. The companies made the announcement at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas.

In laymen’s terms, the new offering adds comprehensive energy efficiency metrics from Power Assure integrated into a DCIM suite from iTRACS. The Power Assure piece also lets users of the combined suite participate in energy markets, potentially generating new revenue by shifting and selling excess IT energy loads.

“With monetization through participation in the energy market, data centers can accurately forecast IT energy loads to automatically shift, shed, and sell their energy loads back to utilities, becoming a source of new revenue,” said Brad Wurtz, president and CEO, Power Assure. “Combined with new cost reduction strategies including better methodologies for Computational Fluid Dynamics modeling, the data center can be converted from a cost center to a revenue center. We are excited to help drive this transformation with iTRACS.”

The combined effort seeks to turn operational data into actionable insight.  The goal is to increase reliability, availability, achieve better server utilization. The resulting data can help data center operators increase rack capacity and consolidate servers for higher CPU utilization. The combined effort aims to help customers save on infrastructure costs, and make money off of better energy management and selling that excess that comes as a result of optimization.

Data Centers Become Revenue Centers

“The financial community is increasingly treating the data center as a capital asset with direct impact on the organization’s top and bottom lines,” said Elizabeth Given, president and CEO of iTRACS. “The data center is evolving from a cost center to a source of revenue and profitability, whether you’re increasing customer transactions per kilowatt or participating in the lucrative energy market. Our partnership with Power Assure underscores the value of an extensible DCIM software suite in fueling this evolution.”

iTRACS is a full DCIM that combines an open systems architecture with a navigable 3D environment. The company believes that systems need to be open, hence the open systems architecture. iTRACS has been in this kind of area since the mid-1980s, originally starting with structured cable and wiring closets and eventually evolving into a full DCIM solution.

Power Assure is a developer of Data Center Infrastructure and Energy Management software for large enterprises, government agencies, and managed service providers. Power Assure’s solutions provide visibility, intelligence, analytics and automation to help CIOs, IT directors, and facilities managers optimize capacity, service levels, and power consumption within and across data centers.

2013 Finally the year of DCIM?

The DCIM industry has come a long way in the last two to three years. There’s a lot of language around it, and in many ways, it’s as confusing as cloud was when it was first getting noticed, and when people were trying to decide whether cloud was applicable to them. In layman’s terms, DCIM is about making money through achieving efficiencies not possible without intelligent and deep insight from smart management of all the pieces and resources of the data center. Gone are the days of the data center manager who “just knows where everything is” and spreadsheets. “We are trying our best to simplify the entire experience,” said William Bloomstein, market strategist from iTracs.

There’s also been a lot of confusion around DCIM pricing. iTracs prices by the rack. “We don’t care how many servers, switches, we care about the actual physical racks,” said Bloomstein, “customers are not charged on a server basis, power, connectivity or any of that stuff.”

The customer base for DCIM will continue to expand as the benefits and opportunities are more fully understood, and DCIM becomes less intimidating. Gartner recently put out a research note that predicts the DCIM market will reach $1.7 billion in 2016.