The Raritan Blog

In the Data Center Knowledge is (Lower Cost) Power

Richard Brooke
April 29, 2013

In my last post, I described the great volumes of power consumption and environmental data you can get from Raritan’s iPDUs, and how that can help you lower energy costs in the data center. We only scratched the surface, though, of the analytics and reporting capabilities of Power IQ software, and how it enables best practices in power management.

Some of the smarts we’ve put into Power IQ come right from the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). Here, I’m referring to their Psychrometric chart, a guide to optimal temperature and humidity ranges for the data center. You can easily set these parameters to serve as notification thresholds for Raritan’s temperature and humidity probes, or competitors’ probes.

The great news: ASHRAE has recently extended the ranges in that chart, giving you a tolerance that allows you to safely save on energy costs—as noted above, up to 4% for every degree raised.

What’s even cooler (no pun intended)—you can put your own temperature and humidity parameters into Power IQ. That’s useful because many server manufacturers have re-engineered their products in recent years to handle harsher environments. Some have even certified their servers to run in 90-to-95-degree environments. You can take those manufacturer’s settings now and incorporate them into your ASHRAE Psychrometric chart. Now you can selectively raise your air temperature and save more on energy.

With the global view of temperatures you get from Power IQ, you can see where you’re over-provisioned or under-provisioned across rows, aisles, and even multiple data centers. You can even see where you’re pumping too much CO2 into the air. Now there’s a feature that’s not only good for your bottom line; it’s the right thing for the environment.

Data Center Energy Provider Rebates

But there’s more: Because Power IQ can actually report on how much CO2 emission has been reduced, that metric yields dollar savings as well. Do a search on “data center energy rebates” and you’ll see that if you can document your CO2 reduction, many energy providers will give you a lower rate.

Being able to say you’ve reduced CO2 emissions by W, kWh by X, power costs by Y, and lowered rates by Z percent will make you a hero in your data center.

Also, Power IQ has joined the great mobile migration. If you want to be not only alerted but empowered to take action if the temperature around a certain server exceeds a certain threshold, there’s a Power IQ app for that. You can get an alert that while you’re away from the data center and proceed to power cycle the affected device, right from your iPhone.

Click here to learn more about Raritan data center power solutions

Limited Free Passes Available for DatacenterDynamics (DCD) DCD Washington taking place May 2nd

Dorothy Ochs
April 25, 2013

Raritan has a limited number of complimentary passes available (for end users only) for the DCD Washington show taking place on May 2nd. Contact us to get your free pass.

We will also have live demos in our booth (#TCB) and a raffle drawing for an iPad mini. Hope you can join us.

For more details, visit http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/conferences/2013/washington-dc-2013

Join us for: "Benchmarking your Data Center"

April 25, 2013

Key Note Speaker:

EDI, Ltd.‘s Jeremy Gilbertson, CTS, RCDD

Topics Covered:

• Why Most Data Center Projects Fail Before They Begin. The importance of benchmarking and accurate statement of requirements
• State of the Industry – Data Centers: Interesting, unique goings-on in the data center industry

Jeremy Gilbertson, CTS, RCDD is Vice President of EDI, Ltd.‘s Data Center Practice and is responsible for overall strategic direction, management, and project delivery for the practice. Jeremy’s expertise involves helping enterprise, third-party provider, healthcare, and higher-education clients understand the current state of their data centers and develop phased strategies that address business requirements, risk profile, and budget.

Join us for an afternoon of leading edge Data Center discussions and real world case studies ranging from design through intelligent infrastructure management followed by a tasting of the best brews and appetizers.

When:

Thursday, May 23rd from 12:00pm-5:00pm

Where:

Gordon Biersch Brewery (Buckhead location)

3242 Peachtree Road N

Atlanta GA 30305

Case Studies on Tap:

• Raritan: Deploying High Power at the Rack
• Fluke Networks: Ensuring Performance of Critical, High Bandwidth Fiber Links
• Global Power Technologies: Power Monitoring Systems Enhance the Commissioning Process for a Fully Integrated Facility
• Vigilent Corporation: Too Cool - Changing the Game in Data Center Cooling

About EDI, Ltd.   EDI, Ltd. is a leading healthcare IT consulting and design firm specializing in medical communication technologies, information systems infrastructure, security, audio-visual systems, and data center.

Attendees will be entered into a drawing for a Kindle Fire!

Space is limited.

What a 55kW Rack Power Strip Looks Like

Henry Hsu
April 23, 2013

Last week, Raritan shipped our first production run of—what we believe to be—the highest-density rack power strip in the industry to date.

Like all other Raritan rack power strips sold in North America, these units are UL Listed (bear the true UL Listed Mark). They will be placed in cabinets that will obviously get very hot, so like all Raritan power strips with the part number prefix “PX2”, these units have a maximum ambient temperature of 140°F (60°C) in North American markets.

Although the customer application is confidential, generally speaking, this power strip could easily handle up to twelve blade chassis (with common configurations) in a Tier IV environment:

• The power strip provides 12 individual circuit breakers, each rated at 20A @ 230V. (It’s actually 240V, but in this client’s case they are running 230V).
• That means each breaker can handle a maximum of approximately 4500W (UL489 breakers on our power strips are fully rated, i.e., they can run at their full 20A specification and do not have to be “derated”.)
• This happens to coincide with real-world power draws of many common blade deployments such as HP c7000 or Cisco UCS 5100 series, etc. So each breaker could potentially support a single blade chassis each.**

**This is meant as a generalization. Please be sure to consult your Raritan power architect for more detailed provisioning guidance.

Today, the status quo for cabinet densities tends to be approximately 5 to 10 kW. Raritan has been very fortunate to have partnered with some of the industry’s most forward-thinking data center operators and architects—and have thus designed and deployed a significant number of different power strip configurations at higher densities. For electrical reasons, they cluster in the 14kW, 25kW, 28kW, 33kW, and now 55kW ranges.

It’s a great deal of fun, and I enjoy advising clients on the best way to deploy ever-increasing power densities at a minimal cost.

Here are some more photos, if you’d like to take a closer look:

• Same photo as above, in high-resolution;
• Top of PDU;
• Bottom of PDU;

Please note:

• This application employs a 1” trade size conduit, to provide input power from the RPP—which is why you do not see an input cord.


• We designed this with two 415V, 3-phase, 40A inputs on each power strip—in order to facilitate certain physical connectivity constraints. But the same electrical solution could have been provided with a single 415V, 3-phase, 80A input.


• Nerds may want to know that technically this is a 57.5kVA-rated power strip @ 415V/3phase, and 55.4kVA @ 400V/3phase. Also, while I use kVA and kW interchangeably in colloquial conversations; when consulting a client, I will more typically assume a modern power factor of approximately 97.5%—thus making this a ~56kW (415V) or 54kW (400V) power strip. But that would be an excessively long title for a blog post, so I just split the difference and call it “55kW”, nominally.

I am obligated by law to mention that this power strip happens to be from Raritan’s PX2-4000 Series—which means that in addition to supplying an absurd amount of power, it also provides billing-grade (+/- 1%) kWh energy metering for every inlet, breaker, and individual outlet [C13 and C19]. It is compatible with our wide variety of environmental sensors (temp, humidity, differential air pressure, leak, door open/close); Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n) options; daisy-chaining; USB mass configuration; etc. And it can be queried via either SNMP v1/2c/3 or JSON-RPC.

But enough with the infomercial… fundamentally, I just think it’s awesome to have a single rack PDU that delivers the equivalent amount of power as consumed by five average U.S. homes.

Visit Us at AFCOM's Data Center World in Las Vegas – Learn and Maybe Even Win

Dorothy Ochs
April 19, 2013

Join us as we discuss how to successfully deploy high power to your racks,  and full power chain and network connection management

Stop by our booth (#835) to see our newest Power, DCIM and KVM solutions

Get a registration discount on us—Use code RARITANS13 Register Now - http://www.datacenterworld.com/spring2013/

Deploying High Power at the Rack
Date: Tuesday, April 30 from 8:15 to 9:15 am
Room: Palm D
Speaker: David Wood - Director, Power Business at Raritan

Full Power Chain and Network Connection
Date: Wednesday, May 1 from10:00 to 11:00 am
Room: Banyan CD
Speaker: James Cerwinski - Manager, Project Management at Raritan

We will have live demos at our booth (#835) and will be raffling an iPad.  Be sure to stop by!

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