Eyeing green datacenter, GE partners with startup SynapSense
Green datacenter startup SynapSenseannounced on Monday that it has secured a $5 million investment from a group that includes General Electric.
The smart grid-minded investment is for the continued development of the Folsom, Calif.-based company's Data Center Monitoring, Adaptive Control and Energy Management technologies.
Joining GE Energy is investors Emerald Technology Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, American River Ventures, Nth Power and DFJ Frontier.
GE Energy Financial Services venture capital head Kevin Skillern had this to say about the four-year-old company:
SynapSense is a strong addition to GE's digital energy, Smart Grid and ecomagination-related investments, offering multiple commercial and development collaboration opportunities in a data center equipment market estimated at $40 billion a year, with annual electricity consumption costing $7 billion.
Data centers are one of the largest single sources of power demand in the United States -- about three percent of total nationwide consumption, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
GE already uses the company's tech in its own datacenters. (So does Yahoo, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Facebook.)
Most interestingly, the deal isn't just a straight investment -- it's also a commercial partnership. GE says it plans to leverage the company's digital energy tech through its Intelligent Platforms business, which covers software, hardware, services, automation and embedded computing.
That means SynapSense technology will link with GE's Proficy Software and Control platform to align cooling capacity with changes in IT load. Naturally, a dashboard offers real-time metrics (thermal, humidity, pressure, etc.) on operational performance.
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com