Eaton Brightlayer Gives Partners UPS Visibility And Control From Anywhere

‘We know when something is about to hit the fan. Whether the environment that your server’s running in is too hot because your workload went through the roof and you have it stuck in a broom closet or the power gets out, we can create policies that drive a reaction, migrate some workloads, power cap servers. There are things you can do in that edge environment to help mitigate the impact,’ Mike Jackson, global director of product, data center and distributed IT software at Eaton, tells CRN.

Power and backup heavyweight Eaton is giving partners a new way to control their UPS units whether they are in the data center or the edge, and manage the growing costs incurred when IT systems lose power.

“The more information we can get in front of these customers. It gives them significant advantage around how do they manage that lifecycle of these devices that are, often forgotten until, something happens and then they’re the most important thing in your business,” Mike Jackson, global director of product, data center and distributed IT software at Eaton, told CRN.

The goal is fewer customer outages, the costs of which have spiraled in recent years, Eaton said. The company estimates that two-thirds of those power loss events cost more than $100,000, while outages that cost more than $1 million increased 10 percent year over year.

“In the data center world, equipment failures and outages are getting more and more expensive,” Jackson told CRN. “I think with more people putting things, in the cloud those impact SLAs, and things like that are driving costs way up. So there’s a significant demand, not just from the sustainability and resiliency side, but there’s a lot of customers looking at their infrastructure, which is either aging or you don’t necessarily know what’s going on, and it can turn into a big a big line item on the P&L.”

Eaton Corp. is based in Dublin, Ireland as well as the U.S. It does business in more than 175 countries. The company’s power supplies back up customers from hyperscalers to remote edge environements. The company recorded sales last year of $20.8 billion and marked 100 years of being traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Its newest offering, Brightlayer Data Centers suite, gives solution providers the capabilities to monitor and control uninterruptible power supplies, power distribution units, switchgear, generators, cooling equipment, battery storage, as well as solar equipment.

The demand for computing power is driving an explosion in energy demands around compute, with Boston Consulting Group predicting earlier this month that data center’s share of U.S. electricity use will triple by 2030.

“That’s the equivalent of the electricity used by about 40 million U.S. houses – almost a third of the total homes in the U.S.,” Vivian Lee, managing director at Boston Consulting Group, stated in a LinkedIn post about the study released Sept. 15.

A full percentage point of that growth is fueled by demand for generative AI capabilities, BCG wrote.

Jackson said in the data center, Brightlayer can show trends, send alerts, create reports, manage power, connectivity, and cooling to streamline IT application uptime.

“We can now provide all the value from a digital perspective in one platform,” he said. “So it’s one project. It’s one software to manage. It’s all license-controlled. So if you want to do capacity planning in your data center, no problem. We just turn it on with the change of a license key, and they get that new capability.”

Eaton is seeing increased adoption across distributed environments, retail, health care and education for example, Jackson said. This is where Brightlayer’s ability to remotely monitor power at multiple edge locations takes on a heightened value for partners.

“We know when something is about to hit the fan,” Jackson said. “Whether the environment that your server’s running in is too hot because your workload went through the roof and you have it stuck in a broom closet or the power gets out, we can create policies that drive a reaction, migrate some workloads, power cap servers. There are things you can do in that edge environment to help mitigate the impact.”