Rack PDU Blog

n a show like “The Walking Dead,” it’s relatively easy to dispatch a zombie. A quick headshot or katana slash will usually solve your problem. In the data center, zombies are just as prevalent, but not quite as easy to kill. First, you have to identify them. Data center zombies don’t exactly shamble around with their mouths agape, but they can do just as much damage as their fictional counterparts if left unchecked.

There’s a memorable scene in “All the President’s Men” when the FBI informant famously whispers, “Follow the Money” to Robert Redford, setting him off on an investigation that will change the world. It’s a phrase that’s been repeated time and again over the years and, yes, it even applies to data center management.

If you wanted to tell the story of the American Dream personified, you couldn’t go wrong by talking about Jack Cleveland. An Eagle Scout who joined the Navy to fight for his country in the Korean War before coming home to raise a family while working and going to night school to better his lot in life, Cleveland reminds you of the old saying, “they just don’t make them like they used to.”

The notion that we should track anything – and everything – about our lives has gained a lot steam over the last couple of years. Witness the rise of the Fitbit health monitor and the slew of smartphone apps that show you how well you’ve slept any given night. People can use these tools to gain a clearer picture of the trends that quietly shape their lives. Much like a Fitbit (but for your data center), the Sentry Power Manager is constantly monitoring and managing your power, even while you sleep. This week, we’ll see how Sentry Power Manager provides power monitoring and management with its easy-to-grasp visual interface that helps you understand your system status quickly.

Today, IT professionals face numerous challenges in overseeing the operation of an efficient data center. Just consider the pressure associated with maintaining 100 percent network uptime while upholding environmental standards. Indeed, data center supervisors are more overwhelmed than ever trying to manage this balancing act. That being said, data center managers are stepping up to the challenge and implementing new ways to cut costs and improve efficiencies all while remaining sustainable. A recent infographic from Intel and Dell reveals just how they are doing that by spotlighting the specific areas of struggle paired with plans to meet these challenges head on.

Stone Soup is an old folk story in which hungry strangers trick the local people of a town into sharing their food. The story is usually told as a lesson in cooperation, especially amid scarcity. It is an Aarne-Thompson tale from around 1548.

It’s easy to think of intelligent PDUs within large populations as separate entities, each with its own needs such as operating system updates, patches and configuration details. Perhaps the smarter approach is to consider them as a single system. That’s the argument we’ve made in the recent whitepaper, “Power Distribution as a System within the High-Density Data Center.” When you shift your thinking to the single system approach, you aren’t completely neglecting the individual unit. You’re still retaining access to the features of the individual components including accurate power consumption reporting, remote access to metrics and secured means of switching power at device level. But you’re also gaining a complete intelligent energy monitoring system that’s easy to configure while providing versatile reporting along with capacity planning and seamless integration.

Ensuring your data center is fully optimized so that it can remain cost- and energy-efficient as well as highly secure, is important for any industry. For the government, however, meeting these objectives is absolutely mandatory as the sensitive data at stake is critical to national and local security, and the costs of mismanagement directly affects taxpayers.

Our client was facing a very nice – but very real – problem: as a facilitator of webinars, it was experiencing unprecedented growth year after year. Webinars, those ubiquitous online teaching and conference platforms, are bringing people across the globe into the same virtual meeting rooms with increasing frequency each day. With this expansion comes the need for increased bandwidth and infrastructure requirements, resulting in technical challenges for the webinar operators.

In the Oscar-nominated film “The Martian,” astronaut Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, uses his wits and available resources to attempt survival on a hostile planet. With a limited supply of food, water and air to breath, he optimizes his immediate resources to mitigate risks posed by the dangerous forces surrounding his space station.