2011 may already be almost halfway over, but Server Technology (News - Alert), a data center power monitoring company, still has a few tricks up its sleeve.
At Interop Las Vegas 2011, the leading business technology event, Server Technology’s Director of New Technologies Calvin Nicholson sat down with TMCnet’s CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) to talk about what’s next for Server Technology and the data center power space.
Server Technology is currently dealing with three different things on three different fronts, according to Nicholson. The first is that Server Technology has recently partnered with RF Code to introduce a new wireless solution.
The solution gives Server Technology the ability to take its cabinet power distribution unit and transmit all the power and environmental information over a wireless connection. The jointly-developed solution integrates Server Technology’s Smart and Switched cabinet power distribution units (CDUs) with patented Per Inlet Power Sensing (PIPSTM), with or without Per Outlet Power Sensing (POPSTM) functionality, with RF Code’s active RFID hardware and management software.
Moreover, Server Technology is addressing the trend toward the 480/277V technology.
Recently, Server Technology presented on the technology at IBM’s Power Technology Symposium this year, which took place May 10-11 in Raleigh, N.C.
Server Technology’s goal at the symposium was to enlighten audience members about the efficiency gains to be had with 480/277V power but point out how utilizing 415/240 volt technology still makes more sense.
“The objective was to convey a couple of things for Server Technology,” Marc Cram, director of OEM and global accounts for Server Technology and presenter at the IBM (News - Alert) event, told TMCnet. “One is that there are efficiency gains to be had by implementing a 480/277 volt architecture in the data center and secondly that while those gains are good, cost wise we feel like the sweet spot is still at the 415/240 volt technology. The reason for that is the standards have not yet been set on the 480/277 volt and so there’s not a widespread availability of power supplies at that 277 volt input range.”
The data center power monitoring company is also getting ready to release a new version of its Sentry Power Manger (SPM), which is a software tool that aggregates the information recorded in a data center.
“That will go out on the network and across subnets and discover all of our cabinet power distribution units and bring all the power information into that system,” Nicholson told TMCnet at Interop (News - Alert) of the new release. “From there you can do repots and you can do trends.”
With Server Technology gearing up for its new release, the company is also spreading the word about the types of problems it can help data center managers avoid. For example, by using Server Technology software, managers can protect against problems created when hot spots creep up in data centers.
“We can alert if there are hot spots in their data center before they have a problem,” Nicholson said. “If you have a hot spot in your data center, you have the potential for devices to go down. We have had customers that have had damaged equipment and all that leads to down time which in a data center is never good – outages, down times, problems, unhappy customers.”
Server Technology software can also help managers understand the overall capacity on a circuit so that they don’t “trip the upstream breaker on that circuit and take down part of or all of the power in that rack.”
Most importantly, the data center power monitoring company can help managers overall capacity within the data center.
“Our demand for compute continues to go up and up and up; we have a number of customers now monitoring down to the device level to really understand stranded capacity,” Nicholson said. “They are providing circuits to the cabinets but they are not using all the power that is there. They want to understand how much more available power they have that they can use to add new devices or where a cabinet is capable of taking a new server versus adding new racks.”
Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication's social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Rich Steeves