Top 10 Reasons Why Hardware Intelligence is Critical for Your Data Center Rack

Nicolas Sagnes
April 5, 2017

Your data center is an absolutely critical part of the business. In fact, the data center of today has evolved into an entity which is tasked with handling more services than ever before. Today, we are seeing entire platforms and new services being born directly within cloud-ready data center platforms.

This is why data center operations are more critical than ever before. And, what makes a data center run efficiently and resiliently? Data and Rack Intelligence.

Data center managers are doing a good job conserving energy — de-creasing PUE, raising data center temperatures, using air-side economizers to reduce energy consumption for cooling — but average power consumption at the rack is still going up. In fact, the increased efficiency means more power is available for servers to support data center growth. Data centers are finding that they must deploy more and more power to their racks. Why is this happening? Data center managers are deploying more and more power to their IT equipment racks to keep up with power-hungry devices.

Nearly half (49%) of the data center managers polled had a maximum rack power density of 12kW or less. Their expectations were that two years later, only one-third (33%) would have a maximum rack power density of 12kW or less. Some data centers today have racks wired to provide as much as 30kVA. Furthermore, in a recent Green Grid research into European data center usage, energy efficiency and operating costs are the most common areas of the data center reported as requiring improvement. This means administrators must examine cost as well as availability as critical design factors. Businesses are asking managers to ensure uptime and availability at all times. So, how are you supposed to perform at an optimum level if you can’t collect and analyze the right data from your rack infrastructure hardware? How do you manage what you can’t see?

Click here to see the top 10 reasons why you need hardware intelligence for your data center rack.