Rack PDU Blog

We are concerned about you and your data center. Your hair is turning grey from the stress of having to manage your facility. You spend long hours toiling in your data center, balancing circuits, performing system maintenance and trying to identify the root cause of system errors.

By now, you’re well aware that you need to make some big changes in your data center. After all, your facility is losing large amounts of money and energy on a daily basis due to widespread inefficiencies.

Here’s some troubling news: According to NASA senior water cycle scientist Jay Famiglietti, the state of California—which is mired in one of its longest and most severe droughts ever—has about one year left before its water supply runs out.

Server Technology's High Density Outlet (HDOT) PDU is a trendsetter in PDU outlet density. But is the HDOT PDU right for your data center? Are you looking to expand your data center? If so, there’s no need to purchase a larger facility with more floor space. You can achieve better results—meaning greater power usage effectiveness (PUE) and greater energy efficiency—by increasing the density of your cabinets. What does this mean? Essentially, the process involves consolidating a greater number of assets into a smaller space using microservers and virtualization.

Think about how hard it is trying to get your kids to turn off the lights when they’re not using them. Why don’t they listen? It’s because they don’t pay the bill; and usually, they don’t listen until you start asking them to chip in on the bill. The same problem exists in multi-tenant data centers, where tenants often have little incentive to reduce their energy usage. There is often a big divide between the expectations of tenants who pay premium rates for data center space and building operators who must deal with exorbitantly high utility bills. Further, multi-tenant data centers are some of the most egregious environmental offenders due to how much power they consume on a monthly basis.

The most important issue you’ll want to address first is the lack of communication that exists between you and the C-suite. Part of the reason your boss is upset is because he or she is paying a lot of money without really understanding why.

They’re silent. They’re always on. And they’re quietly eating up a large portion of your data center power budget. We’re talking, of course, about your zombie servers—that is, all of the servers that lay dormant in your facility yet play no part in your facility’s daily operations. It’s time to rid your data center of this problem. It may take some time, but as AOL recently proved, eliminating zombie servers from your network is feasible—and worth it. The company made headlines recently when it announced that over a five year period, it slashed 14,805 zombie servers from its data centers.

I know we all know this already, and I’m preaching to the choir here, but the pressures on today’s data center managers are enormous and there are no breaks in sight. What’s all the pressure about? Uptime!! That’s the bottom line. Dependability of the infrastructure is on top of everyone’s list. Downtime is just not an option. This is especially true with large enterprises such as banking and trading where the cost of downtime has been calculated to be $6 million a second due to unbalanced trades.

If you’re in the market for data center power monitoring software, you’re already taking a big step towards creating a more resilient, and efficient, network. It’s important to remember before making a purchase, however, that not all data center power management solutions are capable of providing the same level of support.

Recently, you’ve been longing for those halcyon days of the early 1990’s, when data centers were first emerging, and personal computers were the only devices you had to worry about connecting to your servers. Closing your eyes, you can still hear Pearl Jam wafting out of your battery-powered transistor radio... Enough, already. The truth is that what seems like a simpler time was anything but; it’s easy to forget, in other words, from a power management perspective, just how difficult these early days of computer networking actually were. Issues like overloading circuits and overheating servers regularly led to inefficiencies, long periods of downtime, fires and high operating costs. For these reasons, being a data center manager at this time meant having to practically live at work as maintaining uptime was an around the clock responsibility.