Monitoring At The Cabinet, Zone And Location Levels

Pardon the cliché, but knowledge really is power, especially when you’re dealing with actual power in a data center. Take, for instance, the knowledge of how much power your cabinets need and how much power is available, or knowing the IT load. With that information in hand, you can solve a number of data center problems.

Thanks to Server Technology’s award-winning Sentry Power Manager, you can see the amount of power used in a cabinet and roll this information up into groups – or zones – of cabinets.  Alternately, you can roll up power information into locations in order to gain several key metrics that will help you make better decisions, including:

1. Monitoring at the cabinet level: Seeing your power usage allows you to identify potential hot spots in your data center. Also, knowing the amount of cabinet power usage lets you run reports to identify cabinets with the power and space availability for the installation of new devices. Other advantages: you can pinpoint the cabinets that have either exceeded capacity or will exceed capacity at some future time period, based on the current growth rate. SPM’s Predictive Trending tools designed for power and temperature give you reliable estimates - based on past growth – about when you’ll exceed power or cooling thresholds.

2. Zone level monitoring: When you have a solid idea of your zone level power usage (by rolling up cabinet-level power monitoring) you can effectively compare power monitoring information from the UPS or RPP against actual device usage. Also, this information can be used to see how many additional cabinets can be installed within a zone. This is important because power trends and reports provide the worst-case power load levels for the purposes of planning.

3. Location level monitoring: When you’re planning for the allocation of new cabinets, knowing the power usage per location helps. With this knowledge, you can gain a better understanding of how many new cabinets could be supported, based on either the current infrastructure or by adding a new infrastructure.