Adding Smart Power Monitoring to Any Existing Server Cabinet

Large Independent Financial Institution - CS-2HD Success Story

Recently a diversified financial services company headquartered in Chicago was looking for a power monitoring solution for some existing racks within their data center.  This large employee owned private company has offices across the country and in the United Kingdom.  Many of their existing racks had been installed with the cabinet power distribution units (PDU's) that came with the racks which provided no load monitoring or intelligent monitoring capabilities.  There were three particular areas where they wanted to first introduce power monitoring capabilities within their Data Center:

1) Racks with HP® c7000 Servers
2) Quantum Scalar i2000 Tape Libraries
3) NetApp® SAN

The goals for monitoring these particular racks included:
1) Load monitoring to understand how much power each rack was drawing and where there is available power for installation of additional servers
2) Environmental monitoring (temperature and humidity)
3) Identify hot spots within their facility
4) Provide load and environmental alerts via SNMP and email
5) Retrofit existing racks while putting Smart PDU's into the new racks

These goals were met by a single device the Sentry Smart Power Monitor that has two inputs and two outputs designed to go in between the power in-feeds coming into the rack and the existing PDU's within the cabinet.  This product comes in several flavors that have different voltage and current ratings allowing the CS-2HD units to be used for both 3-Phase server and SAN applications as well as the other applications.  The CS-2HD can be 19 inch rack mounted or installed on the side of the rack.  For installations where monitoring is critical and refitting the rack with new PDU's is not practical or impossible the CS-2HD is truly a unique solution paying dividends the day it is installed.