Rack PDU Blog

According to a new study, companies have thus far invested $18.2 billion in U.S. data centers, which is double the amount they pulled in last year. At this pace, they are on track to surpass the total amount for the last three years combined.

How do you balance the electrical needs of a cabinet of equipment with available technology? Many data center facilities have come to rely on a standard rack mount power strip PDU configuration fed by 3-phase, 30A circuits running at 208V. This setup can yield approximately 8 kW to feed your power-hungry IT gear.

Yes, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Google – we’re talking to you and your kind. While most would consider it a good day to dominate the world of commerce, you and your hyperscale computing compatriots have completely changed the landscape of information technology and data centers as we used to know them. Your executive leadership is brilliant, your stocks are soaring, and you’ve got the world at your feet. Well, ever think about what life would be like without the right rack PDU? OK, you have to admit, we’ve got you there.

Your hyperscale data center operates on a lean budget. You want to install your hardware and be done with it until you decommission it for the next efficiency-driven replacement cycle. But real world hardware does fail, and when it does, you want your suppliers to be both knowledgeable and responsive. They need to be able to troubleshoot remotely or on site, and get you answers and replacement product quickly so that your application can be restored.

Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) systems have emerged as a main driver of growth in the booming data center power market — a market, it should be noted, that will continue growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6 percent until 2025, when it will reach $10.77 billion.

Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall has finally passed, meaning the long cleanup and recovery process can now commence. Here at Server Technology, our hearts go out to all of the victims that were impacted by the storm, and to those who will be facing terrible difficulties in the days to come. Already, Harvey is being called the biggest flood-producing storm in U.S. history. Its winds reached 125 mph and brought more than 50 inches of rain to the region, which is an American record. Looking ahead, there are many questions that are starting to come to the surface — perhaps the biggest for the U.S. data center community being, when will the next major storm reach land? And what will it entail? Some scientists now believe hurricanes are in fact getting worse due to climate change, and weaker storms are also happening less frequently.

In a surprising announcement, the Chinese government has issued a full ban on data centers in Beijing whose power usage effectiveness (PUE) exceeds 1.5.

It’s no secret that data centers are massive energy hogs. As explained in a recent Server Technology white paper, “The Power of Hyperscale Compute,” a typical data centers can be 10 to 100 times more energy-intensive than an office. And altogether, data centers use about 3 percent of the U.S. electricity supply. Over the last two decades, as compute and storage densities have increased, rack power densities have also skyrocketed. In the past, a typical rack would consume an average of 1 to 2 kilowatts of power. Now, as we move deeper into the hyperscale era, loads are hovering around 20 to 40 kilowatts. More servers and hard drives are being put into single racks today than ever before, in a scale out approach.

You have a deadline, and you have your goals. Your hyperscale data center design needs to maximize power efficiency. Use free air cooling or adiabatic cooling. And support ambient air operating temperature of 25-35oC, with hot aisle exhaust temperatures approaching 60oC. You need lots of outlets – C13s, C19s, or even something that allows you to blind mate servers to the power strip. And it needs to meet regulatory requirements in most major geographical regions around the world.

What is a PDU? This may seem like a rather existential question, particularly from the blog space of one of the leaders in the marketplace. So why ask such an obvious question? Well, because the answer is not entirely clear. The mission-critical data center world is chock full of acronyms, those pesky, foreshortened forms of communication that allow us to sum up so much in an efficient amount of space. But when they take on a life of their own, they become like the little monsters in the movie ‘Gremlins.’