• Cooling Capacity
With the increase in power comes higher temperatures
impacting the overall performance of the data center.
Cooling is about 40 percent of the energy cost in the
data center.5 The trend is to raise temperature to reduce
the amount of artificial cooling that drives increases
in energy cost savings. This requires all equipment
within the data center to be able to withstand the
same high operating temperatures.
• Space Capacity
Data Centers consume more white space than they need
when they do not maximize the full capacity of a single
rack or cabinet.
Energy Cost
Data Centers are poised to be the largest global energy
users by 2025 at 4.5 percent.6 New applications like
cryptocurrency mining, blockchain technology, and
of course, the rapid growth of connected devices will
continue to have an impact on energy consumption.
Maintaining Uptime/Availability
Data center outages can be very costly to an organization.
According to Gartner, unplanned outages can cost
companies $5,600 per minute and up to $300,000
per hour for web applications. Outages are not only
costly, but they are also difficult to rectify, especially
if there is no supporting infrastructure in place. When
recovering from an outage, all the equipment cannot
be brought up at the same time. In those cases, breakers
trip, power surges damage equipment, and the recovery
effort becomes much more difficult.7
Maintaining High Level of Security
Network security is an important beginning step to avoid
potential attacks and hacking. In the last few years, there
has been an increased concern for physical security,
especially in colo data centers with multiple tenants.
There are new security regulations that must be met in
various markets (e.g., Europe, Middle East and Africa
(EMEA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),
Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)
U.S., Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
58 I ICT TODAY
(PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Account-
ability Act (HIPPA) and EU-U.S. Privacy Shield). Use
of security scanning and assessment tools can assist in
detecting vulnerability and potential attacks, such as
denial of services (DoS).
Through the eyes of the data center manager, there
is the range from environmental devices monitoring
cleanliness of power and energy efficiency of power
usage, to overall power capacity and analytics to prevent
unplanned downtime and outages. Added to these is the
need to monitor and receive feedback data on how
secure the data center is 24/7.
HOW INTELLIGENT RACK PDUs
ANSWER THE CALL
There are many IoT devices being utilized within
the data center white space. IoT devices include power
meters to measure input power, breaker current,
and outlet current. In addition, there are environmental
meters and sensors measuring temperature, humidity,
airflow, pressure, and water leak from condensation.
Electronic swing handle, keypad, door lock, cameras,
and passive infrared devices provide added security.
Many of the IoT devices are connected to the
network and accessible from the cloud and internet.
Within the data center, these devices are connected
through DCM (data center hardware and software),
building management systems, security and authentication
servers, and even IT service management systems.
In the cabinet, device connectivity to the network
is done through the iPDU Intelligent Network Controller
(iNC) utilizing advanced CPU to also collect, aggregate,
store and transfer data. The intelligent rack PDU is
becoming the IoT aggregation point and a control point
In the last few years, there
has been an increased concern
for physical security, especially
in colo data centers with
multiple tenants.