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Server Tech's Smart PDUs Make Data Centers Energy Efficient
By Ashok Bindra TMCnet Contributor
Rack mount power distribution and monitoring solutions provider Server Technology (News - Alert) has made tremendous improvements, both in hardware and software, to its power distribution units (PDUs), which in-turn is enabling data center managers to improve energy efficiency and reduce downtime. In fact, recent advancements in the PDUs is facilitating auto configuration for quick delivery of solutions to give IT and infrastructure professionals the control to make accurate capacity planning decisions, reduce risks and meet energy efficiency goals.
Recently, the company was demonstrating these achievements at Interop (News - Alert) 2012 in Las Vegas where Server Tech’s Senior Director of Software and Firmware Engineering Calvin Nicholson revealed the company was demonstrating hardware and software solutions that are embedded in the PDU, which monitors, manages, and controls the power within the data center cabinet. And the software tool sits over it to provide reporting, trending, logging, alerts and alarms.
“We are tightly coupling our PDUs with our software and leveraging that integration in our Sentry Power Manager (SPM) to save our customers time and money,” noted Nicholson. For example, he said upgrading the firmware in the PDUs can now be done with the push of a button, thereby saving the user lot of time in set-up and configuration. Likewise, the integration of PDU and SPM is enabling the PDU to be auto configured, resulting in a plug-and-play system.
Additionally, the company has just launched a new solutions partner program, designed to bring together complementary data center infrastructure management (DCIM) vendors. The membership in this new program is limited to vendors that have completed some level of integration between their own solution and that of Server Technology’s, and have the ability to identify successful deployments for these integrations within actual customer sites.
One such partner is FieldView, who has significantly benefitted from working with the company, enabling it to become a major supplier of DCIM category asset and energy management solutions.
Nicholson added that an increasingly popular trend he was seeing in the industry was that of the move towards the cloud. He said, “We are seeing a lot of growth in the cloud space.” However, he added, “For us data center space is data center space, whether it is hosted on not hosted.”
He further commented,“We provide lot of features and functions and do a lot of integration with third party companies in getting the power information out of our units and into their monitoring systems.”
Edited by Jamie Epstein
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