Selecting a Rack PDU

In this blog, we shall discuss about the configuration option and what rack PDUs are best for your data center. While deploying PDUs we have to consider the following things, What kind of power do you have? How much power do you need? How much power do you draw? What plug types do you have? How much room do you need for the future? What do you need for the future? Will you add more devices to the rack? Will you need more power in the future? In many companies some of these answers to these question will come from Facilities group, while the other answers come from IT group.

In order to calculate the power which is being used by our server and storage devices, we can add the AMP drawn of all the equipment’s that has been plugged to the PDUs. The amp drawn information can also be gathered by several ways. The equipment manufacturer provides the ‘Name Plate’ or ‘Face Plate’ power ratings. These power ratings are often calculated for the worst case scenarios. Most manufacture offer power sizing tool or capacity planning tool to calculate the power used. Intelligent rack PDUs that monitors power consumption of the server can be a valuable source for calculating the amps drawn by new servers. Power monitoring can be done on whole PDU level, individual outlet or groups of outlet.

      

     Few rack PDUs allow remote power management for monitoring the usage of power. Power outlet cycling is ideal for data center without 24 hours’ staff coverage or devices deployed in remote locations. The ability to schedule power off in an outlet allows to easily enforce IT power policies such as switching off all non-production servers after 6 PM.

     Some intelligent rack PDUs also perform environmental monitoring. With temperature and humidity monitoring, we can identify hot and cold spots in data center or within the rack. By identifying the cold spots where over cooling is taking place, we can increase the temperature on our Computer Room Air Conditioner (CRAC) units. If the space is available in the rack, then we can also add additional servers to that rack. By locating the hot zones in our data center, we can identify the cooling needs that prevent the downtime and damage to our equipment. We can receive alerts by having sensors all over the colocation floor.

     

     Over Cooling and Over Provisioning of the data center will lead to the increase in the operational cost and its harmful to the environment. With rise in cooling and power cost, the ability to monitor and control your power usage helps to promote a cost effective and greener data center.