Steve Houck CEO, Virtual Power Systems

Virtual Power Systems Inc., (VPS) a software-defined power systems provider, appointed Steve Houck as CEO.

With the growth of hyper-scale cloud and enterprise datacenter infrastructures, the need to cut energy costs and optimize the return on power system investments has been greater.

Houck will lead the company’s drive to deliver its Software Defined Power (SDP) approach and Intelligent Control of Energy (ICE) offering to meet the industry’s appetite for efficient power systems.

Commenting on his appointment, he said: “The Department of Energy predicts that US datacenter power consumption will reach 73 billion kWh by 2020. Inefficiency is a major challenge for power systems in these facilities as they are often over-provisioned based on peak demand and include under-utilized redundancy and backup systems. As a result, both capital outlay and operating expenses are far higher than necessary. Our goal with our ICE technology is to cut those expenses dramatically.“

VPS is working with firms such as Intel to address the power concerns of hyper-scale clouds, enterprise datacenters, and modern IT. 

In a recently published white paper Intel and VPS demonstrate how SourceMix, a dynamic redundancy technology from VPS allows Intel Rack Scale Design (RSD) customers to take advantage of RSD’s composability and component upgradeability by extending the utilization of the existing datacenter power infrastructure.

“Our efforts in coordination with industry leaders to create an integrated SDP control plane will complete the journey to true software defined datacenters unleashing the potential of cloud architectures and the next generation of modern computing,” said Houck.

Houck joins VPS from DataCore Software, where he served as COO. His earlier experience includes executive roles at EMC and VMware where he drove the early market adoption of server and storage virtualization technologies.

VPS’ Software Defined Power product suite, called ICE, consists of software embedded into a variety of industry-standard power system hardware modules. The system eliminates the need for over-provisioning by dynamically adjusting power delivery as demand fluctuates in servers, racks and the datacenter. Datacenter providers can generate between 20% and 50% additional revenue within the existing power and space footprint, avoid between $10 million to $15 million per megawatt of capital expenditure, and reduce annual operating expenses by $1 million per megawatt.

VPS ICE modules are seamlessly implemented within existing datacenters in a matter of days and are easy to design into new power systems.