Power Assure Selected by U.S. Department of Energy for $5 Million Grant

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Power Assure™, Inc, a developer of power management solutions for data centers, today announced it has been awarded a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to augment product development efforts and drive commercialization of its power management software for deployment in government and enterprise data centers. Power Assure reduces data centers’ energy consumption by an average of 50%, helping companies meet energy reduction targets and regulatory requirements.

“As part of this trend, data center operators not only have to start monitoring their energy use, but also find ways to automatically turn off equipment they don’t need.”

The DOE award was granted to Power Assure based on its principal goal of transforming data center energy strategy from an “Always On” to an “Always Available” model, which dramatically increases the efficiency of data centers. The root cause of high fixed energy expenses in data centers is that they are built to remain “always on,” consuming their full power load regardless of user demand. Because data center operators can’t predict demand spikes, they build to meet peak capacity loads. With Power Assure’s “always available” approach, the number of servers in use adjusts automatically, in real time, to changing customer demand, while guaranteeing customer service level agreements.

“As more emphasis is being placed on reducing energy consumption, there will be more scrutiny on data centers to cut their energy use,” said David Cappuccio, managing vice president and chief of research for the infrastructure teams with Gartner. “As part of this trend, data center operators not only have to start monitoring their energy use, but also find ways to automatically turn off equipment they don’t need.”

The DOE grant will be used in conjunction with Power Assure’s existing funding to enhance, manufacture, and deliver business management software for reducing energy consumption and related CO₂ emissions in large enterprises. Power Assure’s novel approach will leverage “model-based” optimization technology from PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Power Assure and PARC are working closely together to enable the “always available” approach.

Power Assure's hosted Monitoring Software tracks and accumulates real-time comprehensive data about power usage, temperature, humidity, and application loads across the data center. Coupled with Power Assure's flagship product, Dynamic Power Management, data center operators can balance the supply of compute power with the level of demand from customer applications. As demand fluctuates over the day, the automation software adjusts the number of servers operating in a data center, in real time, to optimize overall server utilization based on application load, power consumption, real-time energy prices, and environmental conditions.

In a press release announcing the project grants on January 6, 2010, DOE Secretary Steven Chu said, “These Recovery Act projects will improve the efficiency of a strong and growing sector of the American economy. By reducing energy use and energy costs for the IT and telecommunications industries, this funding will help create jobs and ensure the sector remains competitive. The expected growth of these industries means that new technologies adopted today will yield benefits for many years to come.” This DOE grant was funded by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) of 2009.

“We are honored to be selected by the U.S. DOE to receive this significant grant,” said Brad Wurtz, president and CEO of Power Assure. “This award will help us accelerate our deployment of transformative technology for improving energy efficiencies and advancing green initiatives for our customers. Projects like ours are needed to make our country’s data centers more efficient, thus reducing energy consumption and their associated green house gas emissions.”

About Power Assure

Power Assure develops and delivers business automation software that reduces energy use and carbon emissions in commercial, corporate, and government data centers. The company's hosted software platform intelligently monitors and manages data center server capacity in real time, maintaining required service levels at optimum efficiency and lowest total cost. Power Assure is based in Santa Clara, California. For more information, visit www.powerassure.com.

About PARC

A center for commercial innovation, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) works closely with clients to discover, test, and deliver new business opportunities. Enterprises and entrepreneurs engage PARC to gain new insights into customer needs, extend technical capabilities/ develop new technology platforms, and acquire valuable assets. Previously known as “Xerox PARC,” PARC was incorporated in 2002 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corporation (NYSE:XRX). For more information, please visit www.parc.com.

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