All That Power

Joel Bryan
February 29, 2012

The days that data center managers could take power and usage for granted are long gone. A few years ago and continuing into 2012, the way organizations analyze and utilize energy in their data centers will continue to force industry changes in power efficiency and analytics. It has recently become common to see organizations grapple with increased power demands in the face of constrained capacity. This is evident considering that most data centers were designed for high performance and high availability, with little attention paid to power.

A recent experience at an enterprise level data center and current Raritan customer gave way to the perfect example of the control/access, infrastructure and intelligent power needs of future data centers and retro fitting data centers. Our customer use case was well thought out and planned to align with the organizations IT department to increase datacenter efficiency through access, control, power, and infrastructure management.

The days that data center managers could take power and usage for granted are long gone. A few years ago and continuing into 2012, the way organizations analyze and utilize energy in their data centers will continue to force industry changes in power efficiency and analytics. It has recently become common to see organizations grapple with increased power demands in the face of constrained capacity. This is evident considering that most data centers were designed for high performance and high availability, with little attention paid to power.

A recent experience at an enterprise level data center and current Raritan customer gave way to the perfect example of the control/access, infrastructure and intelligent power needs of future data centers and retro fitting data centers. Our customer use case was well thought out and planned to align with the organizations IT department to increase datacenter efficiency through access, control, power, and infrastructure management.

The customer topology used to achieve this goal was to first ensure they could access and control all their IT devices using our Digital KVM and serial products (DKX-II / DSX). Next, the customer needed to ensure they had a single point of access to all their IT devices by incorporating Raritan’s virtual access management system https://www.raritan.com/products/centralized-server-management/ Secure Gateway (CC-SG- VM).

The requirements for the power portions of the project were to manage power on/off control of the iPDUs, power compliance tracking, and power utilization rate to help for capacity planning and build out. They were able to accomplish this by deploying our iPDUs in each rack. And by by adding Power IQ, Energy Management Software to the solution. With the addition of Power IQ the customer had the ability to set thresholds and SNMP along with a colorful graph display of power utilization.

We were then at the point where the customer had achieved access and control, and Power management and monitoring. The last step was to track all their IT device assets, power train, and network connectivity. Our client then deployed our DC Infrastructure Management System, dcTrack. With dcTrack’s ability to integrate with PowerIQ and Power-IQ to CC-SG the customer has created a single point of access and control, data entry and work flow creation. With this integrated solution our enterprise customer can now check their datacenter for power capacity, access and control, and IT device and issue change management or additions down to the rack, PDU outlet, IP connection level.

For the all that power go to www.Raritan.com