Rack PDU Blog

Competition is fierce in the global multi-tenant data center market right now. At the midway point of 2015, for instance, the market grew by 4.7 percent. And physically speaking, the market expanded by about 90,000 square meters during the second quarter alone. As DatacenterDynamics pointed out, this growth is being driven primarily by the fact that multi-tenant data centers are able to provide faster network speeds at lower prices for customers by cross-connecting and interconnecting these customers to carriers and other data centers via physical cables. In doing so, they’re able to bypass costly third-party Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

There is a major misconception today that large enterprises alone account for the majority of data center electricity consumption in the United States. Surprisingly, small- to medium-sized business (SMB) operations are using more power. According to research from NRDC, small-business server rooms and closets account for almost half of all server electricity consumption in the nation. The remaining consumption is split between enterprise and corporate facilities (27 percent), multitenant data centers (19 percent), hyper-scale cloud computing (4 percent), and high-performance computing (1 percent).

Your server room is like a growing jungle that gets more complex—and expensive—with each device that you add onto your network. This jungle is mostly comprised of physical servers, some of which are running under capacity and some of which are at or near maximum volume. With this setup, your data is most likely spread out over a vast network that also contains a great deal of “comatose” servers.

Join us at Critical Facilities on October 5-7! We will be at tabletop #220. Visit for a chance to win an Xbox One by playing our "Closest to the Pin" golf game.

You and your coworkers have a laundry list of new items that you need to purchase for your data center. You need new servers, racks, switches and cables.

Right now there is a massive effort on the part of the private and public sectors to try and reverse the harmful effects of climate change here in the U.S. Recently, for instance, the White House organized a group of 12 U.S. companies that all pledged to donate a total of $140 billion to help fund green energy infrastructure. The money will go toward initiatives like green power plants and green energy solutions.

Data center downtime is one of the most expensive threats facing IT professionals today. The overall cost of downtime can range from thousands of dollars per minute to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, depending on the size and severity of the outage.

The widespread opinion in the sports world has been that Tom Brady gained a competitive edge in last season’s AFC championship game when he deflated the game ball, as he’s been accused of doing by the NFL. Though this was an underhanded attempt to gain an advantage, most competitive entities can understand the drive to win that motivated him to take this course of action.

The data center is a complicated organism. In order to get the most out of your data center you need to keep it healthy, and just like keeping yourself healthy, you'll need to monitor your data center constantly.

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!