Intelligent PDUs are Ideal Power Monitors!

A power distribution unit (PDUs) is a single input multiple output device that distributes power to the computers and networking equipment in a data center. Minus all the fancy terminology, a PDU in a data center is analogous to a spike buster in your house or your office; with a few additional protection features, of course.

Types

There are two types of PDUs, they are:

1. Floor- mounted PDUs – Slightly on the expensive side but they are capable of drawing in a larger capacity of raw power and distributing it to any number of lower capacity equipments. They consist of transformers, circuit breakers and some power level monitoring devices. Each PDU feeds power to a number of racks in the data center.
2. Rack- mounted PDUs –  They are smaller in size and comparatively cheaper than the floor- mounted PDU. Their capacity is much limited and they distribute power only within a rack. These are also called Smart PDUs or Intelligent PDUs.

By themselves, rack- mounted PDUs serve the purpose of a spike buster distributing power to individual racks. But when they are built with power monitoring devices, they are called intelligent PDUs. Some of these units come with not only power monitoring equipment, but also come with power control devices right down individual plug level. Some units also include environmental monitoring devices.

Intelligent PDUs

Intelligent PDUs help companies monitor the actual power usage and capacity in their data centers, they also keep track of rack temperature and humidity and power sequence. They also permit remote IT equipment management. The PDUs can be controlled in real time with the help of a web browser or a command line interface. Alerts can be triggered based on user defined threshold values in order to ensure that all the parameters are in the safe limit.

The advantage of these intelligent PDUs is that they provide detailed individual server power consumption reading. That way, you know which server is guzzling more power. Companies can save millions by monitoring the power consumption of the servers; they can also identify unused capacity and channel excess power to equipments that are in need for more power in the data centers.

The Future

To take energy monitoring one step further, some companies offer PDUs fully equipped with energy management software that helps you keep tabs on whether your energy conservation efforts are working or not, which rack is developing a hot spot and which is being overcooled, and carbon footprint values of servers and other IT equipment.

With the skyrocketing energy consumption and costs of the data center, companies can no longer afford to squander away precious IT capital on badly managed infrastructure. The industry is well on its way to make performance per watt its new measurement metric; with this, every watt is to be accounted for. In spite of all the steps taken to improve data center cooling, the electricity bills still show gigantic figures. Energy conservation must be a joint effort from all sectors of the data center. It makes no sense to add ten different devices to measure ten different parameters when you can simply adopt one device to measure all the parameters. Smart racks are, most definitely, the need of the hour.

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