Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1066130
January/February 2019 I 61 over communication from all the PDUs downstream to maintain remote monitoring. Considering that customers can spend anywhere around $200 to $275 per networking port, a robust IP consolidation capability truly brings in additional savings. 2. CENTRALIZE AND COLLECT CRITICAL DATA It is important to have a centralized application that will collect the critical parameters from all the PDUs, allow setting of thresholds and sending a proactive notification of any impending issues. The application should also provide a consolidated dashboard view that quickly depicts the status of all the cabinets within the data center for the administrators within a network operations center. Redundancy monitoring reports for all cabinets should also be available to ensure availability of power when one of the power chain sides is being brought down for maintenance. FIGURE 5: Fully integrating intelligent PDUs with DCIM software allows the data center manager to optimize site performance, track usage against known capacity, test failover capability and identify areas for improvement from a simple, yet elegant interface. Unlike basic or metered PDUs, intelligent PDUs have a network connection that can be remotely monitored, automate collection of data and share that data with DCIM software. 3. BALANCE POWER LOADS AT THE CABINET LEVEL Intelligent PDUs help optimize usage of upstream electrical infrastructure. Equipment, such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), floor PDUs and power panels, require capital expenditure. Full capacity utilization of such equipment through balanced loads helps defer capital expenditure. The easiest way to ensure balanced loads across the data center is to balance at the lowest common denominator, which happens to be the cabinet. Intelligent PDUs provide information about the loading at the cabinet level. Most importantly, the key to effective capacity planning is to have an application that will provide a percentage loading report as well as the absolute loading value for all cabinets and easily put such information at the data center manager's fingertips. A complete DCIM tool may also help perform "what if analysis" that will allow modelling of capacities at all levels against existing consumption and the extra room available. 4. MONITOR AT THE OUTLET LEVEL Ask any data center manager, and one of the justifications for purchasing intelligent PDUs is also to improve operational efficiencies through reduction in energy consumption of IT equipment. The fundamental enabler of this benefit is outlet-level metering provided by many intelligent PDUs today. Making this data really meaningful requires an application that allows grouping of outlets across the PDUs to provide historical energy consumption reports for the groups or individual equipment. These reports help data center operators identify ghost (unused) servers, pick up appropriate servers for virtualization and, most importantly, provide visibility into the overall energy consumption that further enables power charge back reports and brings accountability to the actual users of the data.