Power Assure, Inc. has announced that A10 Networks has deployed the Power Assure EM/4 data center software and gained full visibility and control of all power utilization throughout their data center.  Additionally, A10 Networks has improved cooling efficiency and power distribution to extend the life of its existing data center.  

A10 Networks makes high-performance networking and security products that help organizations of all sizes accelerate, optimize and secure their applications.  The company’s rapid growth was threatening to exhaust the available power and cooling resources in the company’s San Jose data center.

“There’s hardly a day that goes by without some major changes being made somewhere in the data center,” said Todd Kleppe, director of operations for A10 Networks.  “It’s quite challenging to manage a plant that’s different day-to-day, but even more challenging is the need to support the company’s rapid growth with our existing power and space.  So we knew we needed to get better control over how we distributed and used power throughout the data center.  With Power Assure EM/4 we gained insight and control of our power consumption and were shocked to see how much power we actually had available for growth.”  

Kleppe chose Power Assure’s EM/4 Data Center Infrastructure Management platform for a very simple reason, “Sophisticated power management is new to most IT organizations, and we wanted to get it right from the start.  I had great confidence that both the platform and the people at Power Assure were exactly what we needed to do it right. I was impressed at just how easy it was to get up and running, and how quickly we were able to get measurable results.”  

The Results:  Power to Spare

The full visibility and control afforded by the EM/4 platform gave Kleppe both the capabilities and the confidence needed to make some significant improvements.  “We were able to implement a hot aisle/cold aisle configuration to improve cooling efficiency, and we balanced the circuits much better in the power distribution units,” said Kleppe.

The EM/4 platform also confirmed some of Kleppe’s suspicions about power and cooling in the data center, “The system immediately revealed we had a pending problem, but with the changes we made, we now have power to spare,” he said.

“The EM/4 platform includes a real-time Monitoring Module, which gives precise visibility into power use throughout the data center, as well as an Analytics Module that mines this real-time data, integrating it into a single database of useful information to assess usage patterns, identify areas of inefficiency, and model the data center to optimize resources,” said Brad Wurtz, president and CEO, Power Assure.  “We are very pleased with the visibility and utilization improvements A10 has experienced and look forward to continuing to support their rapid growth by getting more usage out of their existing infrastructure.”

“Next, we intend to use runbooks to fully automate power management in the state-of-the-art data center in our new headquarters,” said Kleppe.  “We know there is much more we can do with the EM/4 platform, such as to transition to an Always Available operational model instead of an Always On data center.  This will let us have the IT equipment available to come online when needed rather than staying on all of the time, whether it is needed or not,” concluded Kleppe.