Rack PDU Management Trends for 2024
As data centers grow more complex and power-hungry, rack PDUs are an increasingly important component of data center power circuits.
Modern intelligent rack PDUs have many advanced features and work seamlessly with Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software to provide a complete solution for monitoring and managing data center infrastructure.
Let’s delve into the key trends shaping rack PDU management in 2024 and beyond.
Top Rack PDU Management Trends
1. Increased Adoption of Intelligent Rack PDUs
Basic or “dumb” rack PDUs are no longer sufficient in today’s data center environments. Without providing power usage data or any additional capabilities beyond basic power distribution, these rack PDUs make it very difficult to monitor and manage the power that’s delivered to servers.
Intelligent rack PDUs, on the other hand, include inlet- or outlet-level metering, power control, environmental sensor instrumentation, and other features that are now essential.
That the intelligent rack PDU market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 8.34% through 2028 highlights the fact that more organizations are leveraging this advanced hardware in their data centers.
When paired with enterprise-class DCIM software, intelligent rack PDUs allow data center managers to collect 500 data points per rack per minute. This granular information about the data center environment that makes it much easier to manage.
2. Higher Rack Densities
The rise of applications like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) is driving up the power requirements for the equipment in data centers.
According to Uptime Institute, the average power density per rack a decade ago was around 4-5 kW. Now, some experts predict that rack densities of 15-20 kW could be the norm in just a few years.
Managing high-density infrastructure effectively necessitates the use of intelligent rack PDUs and DCIM software to know if existing racks can accommodate increased power requirements without introducing risk.
3. Focus on Sustainability and Energy Efficiency
Data centers around the world are aligning their operations with sustainability goals, where rack PDUs play a pivotal role in efficient power distribution.
Intelligent rack PDUs offer valuable information about data center energy consumption, enabling informed decisions that can reduce energy costs. This is especially true for outlet-metered rack PDUs integrated with DCIM software.
With this solution, a ghost server report can be run to find all the servers that are wasting energy sitting idle in cabinets. Adding up their total power consumption shows exactly how much energy is wasted and how much money can be saved by turning them off.
Similarly, the energy efficiency of servers can be compared in order identify power hogs and migrate workloads to the most efficient servers.
Environmental sensors such as temperature or humidity sensors can easily integrate with intelligent rack PDUs, and DCIM software can be used to see where you are wasting energy by overcooling equipment.
Energy cost reports by data center, customer, or application are also easy to create. This information can be used to generate billback reports that accurately charge customers for the energy the use and encourage them to seek out ways to minimize their energy usage. Evaluating the energy consumption of your teams and applications will also uncover power hogs and areas where efficiency can be improved.
Vodafone used temperature sensors and DCIM software to increase the energy efficiency of their data centers. They are able to measure the individual temperatures and see the delta-T. This allows them to raise temperatures which saves them a lot of money.
4. Using Data to Improve Uptime
Data center downtime costs $5,600 per minute on average. The costs can be attributed to lost sales, damaged brand reputation, reduced productivity, or SLA payouts.
As such, data center managers are deploying intelligent rack PDUs and DCIM software to maintain uptime.
Rack PDU health polling immediately sends an alert if a device is down so service can be quickly restored, thresholds and alerts for power and environment provide early notification of issues like hot spots or three-phase imbalance, and failover reports simulate an outage to identify which cabinets are at risk and what equipment can continue functioning safely if a power circuit fails.
Using rack PDUs and DCIM software for data center health monitoring, Kingfisher was alerted of an issue in one of their main offices overnight. Because of the alert, they were able to quickly respond and resolve the issue before the start of the working day so that no users were impacted.
5. Automatic Rack Power Capacity Planning
The traditional method of device power budgeting—derating the server nameplate value to around 60-70% is manual, estimated, largely inaccurate, and wastes money. Leading data center professionals are leveraging outlet-metered intelligent rack PDUs and DCIM software to automate device power budgeting and are getting amazing results.
Auto Power Budget is a DCIM software feature that automatically calculates and updates an accurate power budget number for each make and model instance of a device based upon the actual measured load of that device in your environment running your applications.
This highly accurate approach to rack power capacity planning enables more servers to be safely deployed in existing cabinets, deferring the need to build out additional cabinets which can cost $15,000-$20,000 each.
With this feature, Comcast reports getting 40% more usage out of their facilities and power resources.
6. Remote Management and Insights
Whether it’s because of working from home, security concerns, or distributed data centers, data center management is largely remote now. Intelligent rack PDUs and DCIM software are making this easier than ever.
Rack PDUs with remote power control allow users to control power to multiple power supplies with one click. This eliminates trips to the data center to save time and money, improves uptime by enabling quick restoration to service, and provides centralized power control for all multi-branded switched rack PDUs.
Warning and critical thresholds on power and environmental data can be set to provide automatic alerts when readings exceed those thresholds. Then, the issue can be proactively resolved before there is a bigger problem.
DCIM software collects and stores the live measured readings from rack PDUs and transforms it into actionable insights with out-of-the-box dashboard charts and reports. KPIs like Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), stranded power capacity per rack, delta-T per cabinet, and temperature per cabinet are automatically calculated in real-time. Management reports can even be automatically created and scheduled to save time.
7. Cybersecurity Considerations
Security is always a top concern for data center managers, and 2023 saw many large cyberattacks. Since intelligent rack PDUs are on the network, they are potentially a vulnerability and require routine firmware updates.
Maintaining the most recent firmware version for all rack PDUs mitigates security risks, but many data center managers either miss the updates or don’t have the time to perform them.
However, a modern DCIM solution enables a quick roll out of firmware updates in bulk to supported intelligent rack PDUs. Bulk firmware updates are a simple yet effective data center security best practice that can help reduce the likelihood of a cyberattack.
Rack PDU configuration changes like SNMP settings, authentication, and administrator credentials can also be done in bulk. Electronic cabinet door locks connected to rack PDUs may also be supported by DCIM software. This lets users know when cabinet doors are open so they can identify unauthorized personnel in your data center. This information is also captured in audit logs to help with forensic analysis in case of a security breach or suspicious activity.
Bringing It All Together
Data center management is always evolving, but it is clear that organizations are increasingly deploying intelligent rack PDUs and using DCIM software to monitor and manage them.
In 2024 and beyond, the complete solution of rack PDUs and DCIM software can help you improve uptime, increase efficiency, and boost the productivity of people.
Download our rack PDU application note to learn more about how DCIM software centralizes rack PDU management.
Want to see how Sunbird’s leading DCIM software makes it easy to monitor and manage your rack PDUs? Get your free test drive now.