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October 12, 2010 – APC by Schneider Electric, a global leader in integrated critical power and cooling services, today introduced the integration of InfraStruxureTM 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 to non-impacted areas within the data center.

“A comprehensive view of the physical infrastructure allows companies to manage and monitor an increasingly complex IT environment, including the deployment and management of virtual machines,” said Chris Hanley, senior vice president, Marketing & Sales Process, APC. “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 couples events from the physical infrastructure layer with information from the VMware virtual machines. This integration translates critical physical infrastructure events into server impact analysis, identifying how events will impact the host machines in a virtualized 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

InfraStruxure Operations is an application available in the APC InfraStruxure Management Software portfolio, which allows companies to take a holistic view of data center 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), energy use and costs.

"As data center infrastructures increase in complexity with virtualization 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," said Michelle Bailey, IDC's Research Vice President for Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends. "There are many monitoring packages on the market, but APC by Schneider Electric is the first vendor to automate the movement of vm's 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 center physical layout, and provides recommendations on how to resolve issues. Additionally, a location-based drill-down view provides a structured overview of data center locations from a global to local view down to single assets, and the PUE calculator supplies information on daily utilization 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 Program 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 vSphere solution under the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program.

This integration will be available for download in February 2011 as part of InfraStruxure Operations v6.2.