Cisco, Resnick Team for Power System Architectures; Power Assure Helps Software Defined Data Centers

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The Cisco Connected Energy Networks business unit is working with the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech on research toward a clean distributed energy future. The parties are discussing a distributed control architecture for reliable and efficient electric systems and new distributed-market designs by blending economic principles with physical engineering laws.

The Resnick Institute can bring together two very different kinds of expertise: optimization of network systems and the economics of distributed markets to manage future power systems. To date, the discussions between Cisco and the Resnick Institute have focused on a number of areas, including models to assess the impact of rooftop solar, new algorithms for managing complex power systems, and work that proposes an ultra-large-scale grid control architecture to achieve public policy goals for distributed energy.

And in other power news, Power Assure has laid out some recommendations in regards to Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) where all IT infrastructure (servers, storage and networking) is virtualized and applications are delivered as a service internally or externally. However, a complete SDDC also has to match the scope of the original physical data center, including not only IT servers, networking and storage but also power, cooling and the building itself.

Power Assure is offering a mechanism - Software Defined Power - to shift an application to the data center with the most reliable and cost efficient power source at any given time - within the limits of application service level guarantees.

Clemens Pfeiffer, CTO of Power Assure, outlined these recommendations to ensure the proper planning of a complete SDDC environment:

  • Leverage software defined servers, software defined networking and software defined storage solutions to free up applications from physical IT equipment.
  • Add software defined cooling to allow for dynamic adjustments of cooling capacity based on the actual heat output of IT equipment under variable load conditions.
  • Add software defined power that can migrate applications from one data center to another and provides power grid integration to intelligently determine the most reliable configuration for data centers at any given time.
  • Think of the software-defined data center as a pool of buildings, IT and cooling resources that can be used for applications as needed depending on application demand, power cost and availability, weather pattern and resource availability.

Environment + Energy Leader