Energy management specialist Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare Data Center Operation v7.2 data center infrastructure management software is getting components from Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) to help organizations improve optimization.

The software, which is designed to provide data center managers with the ability to operate, monitor, analyze and optimize the energy usage of a data center, now includes IT Power Control powered by Intel Data Center Manager  and the inclusion of the Cisco Unified Computing and Servers (UCS) Manager Plug-in. IT Power Control provides real-time, server-level data on power and thermal conditions within the data center.

The Cisco plug-in provides automatic inventory, proactive warnings, and real-time data showing Cisco UCS power draw, CPU and memory usage. The technology also allows businesses to set the power cap for their racks, improving data center agility by reducing overprovisioning.

Other features in Data Center Operation v7.2 include IT power and utilization monitoring, IT asset monitoring, which aids inventory management and the Genome library, Schneider’s asset library, which enables the software to determine power consumption without needing hardware sensors.

In addition to reducing the power and cooling required to support the IT layer, the platform also provides a report on both top power consumers and underutilized/non-utilized servers.

With IT departments facing growing pressure to improve data center management, impacting energy costs as well as capital expenditure on hardware and software, VARs that can offer a platform aimed at maximizing data center capacity could help their customers reduce the time, complexity — and most importantly, the cost — of maintaining a fully optimized data center.