Opengear Juices Up Open Source Power Management Tools

Responding to users' need to cap runaway power costs in data centers, Opengear has integrated its open source power management tools, and beefed up its line of open source console servers with better power monitoring.

With the new offerings company officials believe corporate users will be able to monitor upwards of 1,000 different uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and power distribution unit (PDU) products from about 100 vendors using a single console window.

"As power costs have increased in data centers, it has become essential to more closely monitor and manage power infrastructures," said Bob Waldie, founder and CEO of Opengear. "By integrating these latest open source power tools, I think we can deliver a true vendor-agnostic power management solution."

With the improvements the company's console server offerings can better report on all UPS and PDU systems located in a data center. They can also better consolidate information flowing in about those servers' environmental condition as well as present that data in an easier-to-read interface, company officials claim.

Opengear's collection of power management tools are built on NUT, or Network UPS Tools, a collection of programs for monitoring and administering UPS hardware.

With this latest release the company's power management tools can now oversee and control PDU systems. It can do this either natively using SNMP or through a "binding" to Powerman, which is an open source project Opengear is conducting with Livermore Labs.

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