Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1132978
58 I ICT TODAY • Cooling Capacity With the increase in power comes higher temperatures impacting the overall performance of the data center. Cooling is about 40 percent of the energy cost in the data center. 5 The trend is to raise temperature to reduce the amount of artificial cooling that drives increases in energy cost savings. This requires all equipment within the data center to be able to withstand the same high operating temperatures. • Space Capacity Data Centers consume more white space than they need when they do not maximize the full capacity of a single rack or cabinet. Energy Cost Data Centers are poised to be the largest global energy users by 2025 at 4.5 percent. 6 New applications like cryptocurrency mining, blockchain technology, and of course, the rapid growth of connected devices will continue to have an impact on energy consumption. Maintaining Uptime/Availability Data center outages can be very costly to an organization. According to Gartner, unplanned outages can cost companies $5,600 per minute and up to $300,000 per hour for web applications. Outages are not only costly, but they are also difficult to rectify, especially if there is no supporting infrastructure in place. When recovering from an outage, all the equipment cannot be brought up at the same time. In those cases, breakers trip, power surges damage equipment, and the recovery effort becomes much more difficult. 7 Maintaining High Level of Security Network security is an important beginning step to avoid potential attacks and hacking. In the last few years, there has been an increased concern for physical security, especially in colo data centers with multiple tenants. There are new security regulations that must be met in various markets (e.g., Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) U.S., Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Account- ability Act (HIPPA) and EU-U.S. Privacy Shield). Use of security scanning and assessment tools can assist in detecting vulnerability and potential attacks, such as denial of services (DoS). Through the eyes of the data center manager, there is the range from environmental devices monitoring cleanliness of power and energy efficiency of power usage, to overall power capacity and analytics to prevent unplanned downtime and outages. Added to these is the need to monitor and receive feedback data on how secure the data center is 24/7. HOW INTELLIGENT RACK PDUs ANSWER THE CALL There are many IoT devices being utilized within the data center white space. IoT devices include power meters to measure input power, breaker current, and outlet current. In addition, there are environmental meters and sensors measuring temperature, humidity, airflow, pressure, and water leak from condensation. Electronic swing handle, keypad, door lock, cameras, and passive infrared devices provide added security. Many of the IoT devices are connected to the network and accessible from the cloud and internet. Within the data center, these devices are connected through DCM (data center hardware and software), building management systems, security and authenti- cation servers, and even IT service management systems. In the cabinet, device connectivity to the network is done through the iPDU Intelligent Network Controller (iNC) utilizing advanced CPU to also collect, aggregate, store and transfer data. The intelligent rack PDU is becoming the IoT aggregation point and a control point In the last few years, there has been an increased concern for physical security, especially in colo data centers with multiple tenants.