Rack PDU Blog

It’s never fun to lose sleep over a problem, but night after night, many of us toss and turn, worrying about the things both within our control and beyond it. For the folks who run data centers, it’s no different.

Over the past couple of posts (Part 1, Part 2), we’ve looked at some best practices for power density and voltage as well as environmental monitoring in the IT equipment racks. In this final installment, we’ll examine power usage and the measuring of energy efficiency. When you measure data center energy efficiency, you’re really monitoring power usage in order to reduce wasted energy. For nearly the past decade, the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and DCiE (Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency) ratings have been the gold standards for measuring efficiency within data centers. Although with ASHRAE 90.4, PUE has been phased out as an acceptable metric for data center power efficiency. At the individual data center level, the end goal of these methods is to help you better measure your power usage so you can start the process of improving your energy efficiency and realizing cost savings for your data center.

In the last post, we explored a pair of tips related to power density and voltage, including the use of three-phase power over single-phase and providing increased voltages to your equipment. This week, we’ll dive into power and environmental monitoring in the IT equipment racks. These days, data centers are constantly dealing with an increase in the number of devices within individual racks. Along with higher operating temperatures, this has led to the need for a careful approach to ensure there are very few – if any - costly interruptions in service.

Billed as “five days of education, networking and fun,” Cisco Live is a major opportunity for networking giant Cisco to show off the latest solutions from 250 of its top partners.

Some things in life just don’t come with a handbook: raising children, navigating the job market, deciding what to do with your life. These things require a combination of on-the-job-training, intuition, planning, and luck. Fortunately, when it comes to data center management, the job is as much science as it is art. In this series, we’ll cover some of the fundamentals every data center manager needs to know when it comes to power.

Customers consistently turn to Server Technology for its expertise in data center uptime solutions. Learn about the PRO2 series within our Switched PDUs and find other ways to stay powered.

If you haven’t met PRO2 yet, it’s time for an introduction. As Server Technology’s newest platform for CDU products, PRO2 is designed with real world power situations in mind, meeting a whole host of power needs for a new generation of data centers.

You’ve often heard us talk about being your Power Strategy Experts and how our relationship with clients extends well beyond the sale, so it shouldn’t be a major surprise that Server Technology’s new website features a wealth of information from product manuals to technical notes to white papers, case studies and more.

Build Your Own PDU, step 1 (choose Smart or Switched), step 5 (select outlet type), step 7 (choosing color quantity and quote) “If you build it, they will come.” Many people think they recall this line from Kevin Costner’s 1989 baseball film “Field of Dreams,” but the actual line is, “If you build it, he will come,” referring to the main character’s late father, John Kinsella. Semantics aside, the line holds a powerful message: when you set out to create something of your own – something built for your needs and no one else’s – it’s likely others will find value in it, as well.

The HDOT is the most feature-rich rack mount PDU we’ve developed to date, and it’s perfect for customers who have between 36 and 54 devices in their cabinet, need quick-turn PDUs with a large number of outlet variations, are looking to minimize power drops, and need high-temperature PDUs. The proprietary outlet design of HDOT makes it the perfect tool for capacity planning, power density, and uptime.