Rack PDU Blog

Before you can nestle all snug in your bed, you need to make sure that the only clatter that will wake you from your slumber this holiday season is, indeed, eight tiny reindeer landing on your roof. That is, if you want to enjoy holiday cheer inside and outside of your data center, only best-in-class power management solutions can keep nasty visions of potential power outages at bay.

There are a lot of best PDUs, then, and that is the point. The goal of our product line and the design of our manufacturing process is to allow our customers the ability to find exactly the right set of power distribution features for their application. Why else would Server Technology provide so many options, from horizontal to vertical, 120V to 415V, low density to high, and from managed to not? It is because every data center rack is its own unique deployment, which demands the ultimate in flexibility from those devices that power the load.

These days, there’s no shortage of new and exciting alternative data center power options from which you can choose. Consider nuclear energy, for instance. A few years ago, nobody was using nuclear energy to power their data centers. But now, some facilities are starting to consider it.

Today, you may be feeling as if you’re skating like a professional, gliding across the ice without so much a care in the world. After all, your data center is efficient (enough) and you aren’t too far over budget. So what could possibly go wrong? The truth is that all it takes is one major power outage for things to quickly go south. Just look at what happened to the Telecity Group as an example of what can happen if you’re not vigilant. The company recently experienced two back-to-back power outages, which disrupted operations for its many customers that use the London Internet Exchange and accompanying AWS Direct Connect service. The scale of this outage was immense and it negatively impacted the company’s uptime, as you can easily imagine.

This season, in particular, will put a major strain on businesses across the U.S. as electricity prices are bound to increase yet again. This is particularly true for businesses located in New England, which is still suffering from a lack of adequate pipeline capacity for natural gas. All signs indicate that when energy prices reset in a few weeks, many business owners in this energy-starved region could be in for a rude awakening. And as a result, many employees may be asked to bring sweaters to work in January.

It might be winter, but Google and Duke Energy are catching rays in North Carolina with their new solar powered data center. And hopefully they’re wearing some shades, too, as the data center is contracted for a whopping 61 MW of solar power...now that’s a lot of UV. In fact, Gary Demasi, who oversees data center energy and location strategy at Google, wrote in a recent blog post that the volume of solar power Google’s invested in could power almost 12,000 average U.S. households.

Doing a good deed makes us feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. But, there are more impactful, large-scale reasons why many data centers are transforming to become the do-gooders of the world. More specifically, right along with capacity planning, complying with industry regulations and power monitoring, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is now among organizations’ top data center initiatives.

The creators of the data barge are hoping that it will serve as an efficient and eco-friendly solution to today’s data center power consumption challenges. In fact, the nautical data center will be cooled by the water in which it floats and is projected to engender a power usage effectiveness rating of 1.045, which is quite near its initial goal of 1. As such, the data barge may very well serve as an innovative answer to improving energy efficiency in the data center, however, its unconventional architecture comes with inherent risks.

Everyone put on your spacesuits, we’re about to take a journey into the Final Frontier. Alright, maybe not outer-space per-say, but we are going to explore NASA’s new data center at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA, like many modern enterprises, is taking measured steps towards consolidating its data center infrastructure to preserve energy and improve uptime. In fact, the new data center at the Kennedy Space Center replaces five legacy centers that were ultimately draining power and utilizing unnecessary space.

The modern data center places increasing pressure on 'humble' PDU and power management technologies to help deliver more value, in terms of issues such as capacity planning and reporting, higher density environments, and increased uptime. The latest solutions in the Server Technology portfolio are designed to address these, and other, data center optimization objectives.