ABB invests in NASA-favored IT energy management firm

The company behind the technology NASA is using to cut energy consumption at more than 75 data centers has closed on $13.5 million in funding led by ABB.

Other investors in Power Assure, which provides energy management software for data centers, include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Good Energies, and Judith Point Capital all participated.

“The data center market continues to grow at 8 to 12 percent per year,” said Tarak Mehta, head of the low voltage products division at ABB. “However it is becoming constrained by the availability of power, especially in high density areas where space is a limitation.”

ABB has become a strategic partner of Power Assure to help strengthen its position in the server optimization and IT-focused energy management market.

Over the past six months, California-based Power Assure has announced a number of milestones, including the news that NASA has standardized the use of its software across all the space agency’s data centers. The company also launched PAR4, a new energy efficiency rating measuring server power use on a transaction-per-watt basis, and — with Underwriters Laboratories (UL) — released a new UL standard, UL2640, based on the PAR4 methodology.

Power Assure plans to use the new funds to expand sales and marketing, and to invest in further engineering to advance its technology.

In addition to ABB, Power Assure has also partnered with Cisco, Dell, IBM, Intel, In-Q-Tel, Raritan, UL and VMware.