Rack PDU Blog

In less than a month, school will be back in session. As any school administrator can testify, August will fly by—which means there is little time left to make sure everything is in top working order before students hear that first bell ushering them into their classrooms.

Over the years, we have heard many data center personnel state that DHCP cannot and will not be used for infrastructure pieces like cabinet PDUs. All Server Technology CDUs are shipped with DHCP enabled so that the user can setup the DHCP server to provide IP settings based on MAC address. For those installations where that is not a viable solution, Server Technology has developed the StartUp Stick for quick mass-deployment. Now, instead of walking the floor with a crash-cart and writing scripts to handle the initial network configuration, you can sit in the comfort of your office using our simple spreadsheet configuration tool and then walk the floor with this simple tool instead.

Your company works hard to maintain its esteemed reputation. Customers know that they can trust your company to deliver on its promises and maintain its integrity. Your company, in other words, has a lot to lose. Going green is a serious endeavor, one that takes a big commitment. Don’t promise to make this change in your organization without a proper plan, or you’ll risk losing credibility with your customers and business partners.

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.