If you want to know just how important Server Technology’s (News - Alert) Quality Power Architecture (QPA) technology is – aside from the fact that it’s the foundation that enables Server Technology’s Sentry CDU solutions to support the quality, breadth and flexibility of its rackmount PDUs – then consider the following.
“It’s like LASIK,” Mark Harris, vice president of marketing at Server Technology told TMCnet. “You don’t shop around for the cheapest LASIK, so why would you shop around for the cheapest PDU? QPA allows us to treat rack-based power as the mission critical system it really is.”
“QPA is the secret sauce that allows us to quickly respond to customer demands,” he added. “It has technical requirements about how you make products last forever and work under extreme stress conditions. In the PDU world, it’s not what you see that matters; it’s actually what you don’t see that counts. Why buy $100,000 worth of equipment from Cisco (News - Alert), HP or anyone else and then use the cheapest power infrastructure you can find? That’s not really what IT professionals want to do any longer. They want power solutions that are going to work after 1,000 or 2,000 days exactly as they worked on the first day. That’s what we do. We are known for solid power products that work exactly as stated for years and years. With Sentry PDU products designed using our QPA, we just don’t have failures.”
The reason Server Technology is known for success with its power solutions and not any failures is because of its rich QPA technology. Founded almost three decades ago, Server Technology provides data center power distribution solutions to data center and telecommunications companies.
Since Server Technology has been around for over 28 years, focusing solely on power solutions, it has “the deepest understanding” of what it takes to make a rack-based PDU product that not only looks good on the tradeshow floor, but has the ability to last and work forever, Harris said. And one of the main ingredients is the Server Technology QPA.
“A lot of the products that are delivering power to racks are basically sheet metal, some wire and a slew of individual connectors all wired together to create a power distribution unit,” he said. “What we did with QPA is we looked at it and said these products are so mission critical that we need to make sure they are designed to not only work in best case scenarios, but in worst case scenarios as well, for long periods of time, and under extreme temperature and power stress conditions. QPA was developed years ago to allow us the ability to bring components to the table that match customer requirements quickly, under any power and environmental conditions.”
Server Technology QPA covers every aspect of the active technology found within as well as the mechanical design elements of our Sentry line of PDU units: the set of CAD tools required to create the mechanical designs for various configurations up to and including the active components found in PDUs; integrated network adapter providing the remote access and intelligence; environmental sensors for temperature and humidity monitoring; internal communication bus which is critical to allow reduced internal wiring and support for any combination of integrated power handling modules; user display module, which displays easy-to-read energy consumption; and power input modules, which offer inlet power monitoring and distribution, among other things.
Some of the main benefits of the QPA technology are its quality and reliability aspect and its quick time-to-market. Moreover, its unique bus orientation allows Server Technology to react quickly to customers’ special needs. Whereas some companies have five or 10 different versions of power for customers, QPA allows Server Technology to customize PDUs for each customer. At the same time, QPA allows the company to assemble any combination of intelligent modules which can then be tested individually and then retested as a complete unit, which has resulted in Server Technology rarely having a PDU sent back for repair or replacement. QPA allows Server Technology to test every single PDU that leaves their factory prior to shipment.
“Today, we have over 2,000 variations of PDU products which have resulted from specific customer requirements,” Harris said. “Some alternative PDU vendors attempt to limit customers’ requirements and instead try to steer customers towards their own limited number of PDU offerings. Their designs are inflexible so the number of offerings is small. We take the opposite approach with customers. We offer to them any one of our existing designs or will design custom configurations at their choice. With QPA as our core competency, we encourage customers to ask for exactly what they need- and we deliver. Server technology’s QPA tools quickly generate those exact designs and our production systems allow us to put them into standard manufacturing.”
“QPA allows us to build the best PDUs on the market, period. We call it our Secret Sauce, but it’s not really a ‘secret’, it’s 25 years of expertise rolled into good business practices” he added.
Edited by Jennifer Russell