Data Center Power

Server Technology Helps Box.com Face Data Center Power Challenges

By Rachel Ramsey TMCnet Web Editor

Managing and monitoring data center power is critical to uptime. IT management is a key focus for many organizations seeking to reduce costs and minimize the environmental impact from IT operations, and as organizations grow ever more dependent on IT every day, this trend shows no signs of slowing down. Organizations are discovering that data centers designed to provide the highest level of performance per square meter at the lowest power levels can derive up to 30 percent additional capacity from existing facilities.

Recently, Jeff Routledge of Box.com and Calvin Nicholson from Server Technology presented at Technology Convergence (News - Alert) Conference in Santa Clara in a session titled, “Managing Power in a Hyper-Growth Environment: How Box, the Fastest Growing SaaS (News - Alert) Company in History, Manages Their Data Center Environment.”

Box.com is a provider of enterprise cloud storage and data management. Users can share access and collaborate with important content anywhere from any device. 93 percent of the Fortune 500 is using Box (News - Alert).com today, serving more than 10 million customers. With the company’s growth to manage customers, employees, contacts and other data, comes big IT challenges.

The company turned to Server Technology (News - Alert) to help face challenges of scalability, power usage, efficiency, capacity, remote management, third party integrations and upgrades and support.

Server Technology, a provider of data center power management and monitoring solutions, provides disaster recovery solutions for Box.com so the company can monitor and manage power remotely, without having o have people on site.

 “With intelligent PDUs today you’ve got a lot of information. You’ve got power information, you’ve got environmental information, a lot of alerts and alarms, information down to power level at the device… to really leverage all of that information you need to roll out a tool that can handle that kind of information – make it easy to use, give you reports, give you trends, and also help you manage devices in both initially installing the units and also in the system with things like firmware upgrades. So there’s a lot of value on both managing the system and on the support side,” said Nicholson.

Server Technology’s Sentry Power Manager (SPM) gave Box.com the power to see what is happening at the rack level, PDU and at the server level, which has been extremely helpful in gathering those metrics and trying to correlate them to the growth of the business, said Routledge.

SPM is a flexible, stand alone power monitoring system and has the option to be middleware for DCIM or BMS integration, making managing PDUs easy. The Plug & Play SNAP feature in SPM allows users to create a template to store within SPM, managing their entire network from the SPM dashboard. They can take the PDU out of the box, throw it on their network and schedule a discovery or manually check in.

“That’s really what stands apart with Server Tech. I’m able to, in real-time, see how much power I’m using at that rack level,” said Routledge. Recently, the iPhone (News - Alert) 5 and iOS 6.1 jailbreak was released, which doubled Box.com’s bandwidth. Envasi0n, the jailbreak tool, broke a record with jailbreaking seven million devices in just four days. Box.com was able to capacity test its infrastructure and correlate right along with bandwidth usage.

To learn more about how your company can benefit from Server Technology’s data center power management and monitoring solutions, visit www.servertech.com.