Rack PDU Blog

PUE is nothing more than a ratio that compares a data center’s total energy consumption to the energy that is consumed by its IT equipment. In other words, it’s a way of seeing how much power your servers are using, versus your lights. The ideal PUE for a data center is 1.0, while a reading closer to 2.0 indicates that for every kilowatt of electricity consumed by the equipment, another kilowatt is needed to power the facility.

Let’s face it, power is often one of the last boxes you tick on your data center to-do list. Nobody intends to save one of the most mission critical elements for last, but time and again, it’s one of the final pieces of the puzzle data center managers deal with.

While the private sector is experiencing unprecedented data center growth, the exact opposite is happening in the public sector. Even though the federal government is using just as much data and technology as any other entity, the marching order for federal data center operators is reduce, reduce, reduce.

In Part 1, we explained how the federal government is improving data center efficiency, lowering overall energy costs and optimizing their data center environments. In our next segment, we will dive deeper into solutions that can help meet those critical needs. Federal Sales Manager Jason Mollicone discusses how Server Technology’s expertise with intelligent PDUs positions the company to best provide solutions to the power challenges faced by the federal government. He says the need for remote monitoring and management has become a priority over the past couple of years. “We’re really starting to see those conversations come up in the federal space,” he says, explaining that Server Technology’s intelligent rack power solutions – from our Smart rack PDUs to our Switched PDUs - can help clients drill down to the outlet level, if needed, to see individual IT device power consumption and trends while allowing all necessary data points to be collected.

Back in the early days of information technology, data centers were almost embarrassingly wasteful entities. But this was a different time, before the necessary technology was available to accurately track and manage power consumption over time.

This is your data center speaking. You think you know me pretty well, right? After all, you spend almost all of your time around me. Take a harder look, however, and you’ll see that there are some important things about me that you aren’t aware of!

Conversely, a smart PDU will provide the same level of critical power and environmental data, but will not allow you to make changes to the outlet from a central location. Smart PDUs are more for monitoring and reporting purposes.

Thanks to its modular design, each HDOT product type gives customers the flexibility to configure the location and quantity of C13 and C19 outlets on the PDU. As a result, there are literally thousands on thousands of configurations possible. To get a sense of how customizable our PDUs really are, check out our Build Your Own PDU tool which walks you through four easy steps to building the perfect power solution for your data center. It’s so remarkably easy that you can even build a PDU right from your tablet or phone.

Look at you, skulking around your data center like Lord Vader at home in his Death Star. Sure, you don’t have any plans to destroy any competitors’ offices or nearby planets with your super laser any time soon, but you’re pretty confident that, if given the opportunity, you could. In the meantime, you can rest easy in your ergonomic office chair knowing that your department—and job—are safe and secure. Right? Well, this is exactly what Darth Vader did. And it didn’t work out too well for him.

If there’s one need you can’t skirt around as a colocation provider, it’s rack-level power management. Power is expensive, and there is too much at stake in your mission critical environment to go without a reliable network of intelligent power distribution units (PDUs) that can track daily usage, prevent outages and respond to environmental alerts.