Eaton launches Intelligent Power Pod in EMEA

Power management company Eaton has launched its Intelligent Power Pod in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Developed expressly for modern IT architectures including converged and hyper-converged infrastructures, Eaton's Intelligent Power Pod is an integrated system incorporating power backup, power distribution, power management, housing and support services. The system provides the business continuity and resilience IT professionals need by offering them reliable physical infrastructure, while also integrating fully with hypervisors and initiating automatic migration of virtualised equipment to the cloud or backup site on a power outage. Converged solutions that incorporate Intelligent Power Pods are subsequently protected, managed and intelligent; they work non-stop, ensuring that businesses stay live 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

"The overriding priority for today's IT and data centre managers is ensuring that business critical applications continue to function at all times, even when there is a power interruption," says Cyrille Brisson, vice president, EMEA, Eaton Power Quality. "They don't want complex individual power protection or power management components that take a lot of time and electrical expertise to set up and manage, but are looking for a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution. The new Intelligent Power Pod offers these tools, not only housing and powering IT equipment, but also enabling remote power management through the virtualisation dashboard."

Eaton's Intelligent Power Pod provides virtualisation-ready backup power configured to match the user's needs, with facilities for checking and modifying the configuration and status almost instantly. The backup power provision is complemented by reliable power distribution that allows accurate monitoring of power consumption and supports remote management of IT equipment, including switching and restarting. The Intelligent Power Pod housing is based on Eaton's proven and highly regarded range of IT racks. These provide solid protection for the IT equipment mounted within them, and also offer excellent airflow management that helps to minimise energy costs.

The powerful yet intuitive Intelligent Power software integrates fully with hypervisors and virtual machine management systems including VMware vCenter, vSphere vMotion and Citrix XenCenter. This means that users can conveniently and efficiently monitor their entire IT installation, including the power infrastructure, in the same location using the same management pane. The Intelligent Power Pod also has a provision for triggering the automatic migration of virtual servers during power outages, allowing them to be moved to a backup site that is unaffected by the power problems or to the cloud, thereby maintaining business continuity.

The Intelligent Power Pod is complemented by support services that help users to protect the value and performance of their power infrastructure investment by keeping it in top condition at all times.

Eaton has worked closely with companies like Cisco, NetApp, EMC and VMWare to ensure that its solutions are suitable for converged infrastructure, integrating with platforms such as Cisco's Unified Computing System server management and network devices, VMWare software and NetApp storage devices as well as supporting the requirements of such converged infrastructure solutions as FlexPod, FlexPod Express and EMC's VSPEX.