Demonstration at 'Cisco Live' Shows How Virtual Machines Relate to Physical Environment and Can Automatically Migrate to Healthy Hosts

Dubai-UAE: 04 April, 2011 - APC by Schneider Electric, a global leader in integrated critical power and cooling services, recently introduced the integration of InfraStruxure™ Operations with VMware vSphere™ to enable vendor-neutral inventory management, real-time analysis and automated resolution recommendations.

The integration ensures that VMware vSphere is aware of critical physical infrastructure alarms and events, including power, cooling, security and environment, and can execute corrective actions to move virtual machines (VMs) to non-impacted areas within the data centre.

Chris Hanley, Senior Vice-President, Marketing and Sales Processes, APC, said: "A comprehensive view of the physical infrastructure allows companies to manage and monitor an increasingly complex IT environment, including the installation and management of virtual machines. VMware customers deploying virtual clusters now have the necessary insight into how their virtual machines relate to physical servers and their location. InfraStruxure Operations automatically migrates virtual machines to healthy host environments, enabling customers to maintain their Service Level Agreements."

Through the integration, InfraStruxure Operations combines events from the physical infrastructure layer with information from the VMware virtual machines. The integration translates critical physical infrastructure events into server impact analysis, identifying how events will impact the host machines in a virtualised environment. The result of the impact analysis will prompt a migration of the virtual machines away from the affected hosts onto unaffected host servers.

InfraStruxure Operations is an application available in the APC InfraStruxure Management Software portfolio, which allows companies to take a holistic view of data centre physical infrastructure, including traditional monitoring and control of power, cooling, security and environment, as well as trending and analysis, predictive simulation and capacity scenarios, equipment age and health, current and historic power usage effectiveness (PUE), as well as energy use and costs.

Michelle Bailey, IDC's Research Vice-President for Enterprise Platforms and Data Centre Trends, said: "As data centre infrastructures increase in complexity with virtualisation and cloud computing, it becomes even more important for the IT manager to have real time visibility to the health of the physical layer via software. There are many monitoring packages on the market, but APC by Schneider Electric is the first vendor to automate the movement of VMs to healthy host machines based on the availability of power, cooling, and server resources. This results in enhanced system availability and peace of mind."

InfraStruxure Operations enables vendor-agnostic inventory management with real-time device failures, presents data shown within the data centre physical layout, and provides recommendations on how to resolve issues.

Additionally, a location-based drill-down view provides a structured overview of data centre locations from a global to local view down to single assets, and the PUE calculator supplies information on daily utilisation of energy. InfraStruxure Operations runs in concert with APC's InfraStruxure Central which captures and aggregates device data from the physical infrastructure layer.

APC is a member of VMware's Technology Alliance Partner Programme providing integration between APC's PowerChute Network Shutdown and VMware ESXi on all APC Smart-UPS models. APC is working with VMware to validate the vSpere solution under the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Programme.

The integration has been available for download since February 2011 as part of InfraStruxure Operations v6.2.

For more information, please visit www.apc.com/software.

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About APC by Schneider Electric
APC by Schneider Electric, a global leader in critical power and cooling services, provides industry leading hardware, software, and services designed to ensure availability and higher energy efficiency across the residential, business network, data centre, and manufacturing environments. Backed by the strength, experience, and wide network of Schneider Electric's Critical Power and Cooling Services, APC delivers well planned, flawlessly installed and maintained solutions throughout their lifecycle. Through its unparalleled commitment to innovation, APC delivers energy efficient solutions for critical technology and industrial applications.

www.apc.com

About Schneider Electric
As a global specialist in energy management with operations in more than 100 countries, Schneider Electric offers integrated solutions across multiple market segments, including leadership positions in energy and infrastructure, industrial processes, building automation, and data centers/networks, as well as a broad presence in residential applications. Focused on making energy safe, reliable, and efficient, the company's 100,000+ employees achieved sales of more than $22 billion in 2009, through an active commitment to help individuals and organizations "Make the most of their energy".

www.schneider-electric.com

For further information, please call:
APC by Schneider Electric
Sakina Tazun
Tel: +971 4 7099 624 
Email: sakina.tazun@apcc.com

Jiwin Public Relations
An APCO Worldwide Company
Rishi Talwalker
Tel: +971 4 361 3572
Mobile: +971 50 9110865
Email: rishi.talwalker@jiwn.ae

© Press Release 2011