News

Partners Deploy Software-Defined Power to Demonstrate Energy Efficiency

February 02, 2018 by Paul Shepard

Virtual Power Systems (VPS), creators of Software-Defined Power®, is working with SAP's Multi-Cloud Computing team and the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Silicon Valley to validate the use of VPS' Intelligent Control of Energy® (ICE) platform for optimizing power delivery. With VPS ICE, SAP will test the ability to track, monitor and manage power usage within the data center while automatically reallocating power distribution based on capacity and availability demands.

"As the market leader in Software-Defined Power, we enable on-demand power delivery by dynamically allocating capacity to data center servers, racks and systems, as needed," said Steve Houck, CEO of Virtual Power Systems.

"With ICE, next-generation data center and cloud providers can increase power capacity and resiliency within existing IT footprints to improve revenues while reducing capital and operating expenses. Enterprise customers also benefit from reduced power infrastructure wait times and costs, empowering them to invest more in IT initiatives that drive business innovation,” continued Houck.

Typically, power and cooling costs more than the IT equipment it supports, which pressures data center and cloud operators to find ways to drive energy efficiencies without compromising system availability or reliability.

VPS conquers this challenge by utilizing Software-Defined Power to abstract power controls through a layer of software virtualization. By applying machine learning and data analytics, Virtual Power Systems enables better management of data center growth while relieving power-capacity constraints.

SAP Co-Innovation Labs (COIL) provide infrastructure and space for SAP, its partners and customers to co-innovate new solutions to the most-pressing challenges organizations face in the digital economy. VPS' transformative ICE technology will monitor data-driven workloads and offer real-time visibility into the exact amount of energy used by specific data-center systems and applications.

"Virtual Power Systems enables us to implement the fourth and final pillar in our overarching 'Software-Defined Everything' data center strategy," said Mikael Loefstrand, SAP vice president, Cloud Architecture & Engineering.

"The ability to support compute, storage, network—and now power—virtualization will help SAP operate the most advanced and efficient data centers in the world. The opportunity to simulate real-world data center scenarios in our lab is ideal for examining cutting-edge technologies and solutions that can be readily applied today,” concluded Loefstrand.

Schneider Electric, a valued member of VPS' partner ecosystem, will support the deployment and help demonstrate the ease with which VPS' ICE technology can increase power capacity by up to 40 percent without compromising data-center or system availability.

"As an early VPS partner and collaborator, Schneider Electric has successfully implemented ICE intelligence in our Galaxy VM UPS line," explained Jeff Samstad, director of innovation and new businesses at Schneider Electric. "Together with VPS, we look forward to helping SAP, along with SAP HANA customers and partners, realize considerable capacity enhancements at global Co-Innovation Labs as well as more than 50 data centers around the world."