Data Center Power Management, From The Bottom Up

Fashions and tech trends come and go, but some things in life remain constant. For data center managers, those constants include the challenges of understanding growth through density awareness, capacity planning and uptime maintenance, among others. Also constant is the need for outlet switching and outlet-level power measurements in order to hit goals related to complete device management, growth and efficiency.

In our recent whitepaper, “Bottom-Up Data Center Power Management,” we detail one of the main ways to achieve these goals: the use of rack PDUs with outlet switching and outlet-level power measurement capabilities.

 The paper delves into the following topics:

• Managing IT Devices: IT devices housed in the data center must be managed not only for what they’re doing during operation, but also for their lifecycle from deployment through retirement and everything in between.
• Lock-out and Deployment: The three big questions of “where” relate to power, cooling and space required to support new devices in the data center. We’ll show you why the method of installing equipment simply where it fits isn’t an optimal approach, and why the locking out of outlets is a better way to go.
• Tracking: More easily manage deployments by configuring the basic characteristics of each piece of equipment.
• Managing Growth: Why it’s no longer valid to only think about growth in terms of the overall data center size or total number of data centers.
• Density: Learn about the extent to which the particular equipment in each rack plays a major role in the overall density of power usage in the data center.
• Capacity Planning: See how to set a threshold limit for capacity to allow for an alert, which results in an actual prediction for when a cabinet will run out of power or exceed a temperature threshold.
• Managing Efficiency: Learn about maintaining the balance between “going green” and “saving some green” in your wallet.