Data center power is certainly a key issue for any company maintaining any kind of traffic over their network. If the company is working toward expansion, data center power must be considered to ensure the reliability and efficiency of the network can be maintained.

This was the challenge for a global stock trading company with offices based in Chicago, New York and London. The company maintained servers stored in co-location facilities near major exchanges to minimize any issues with latency.

To properly manage their expansion and get the most value out of their racks, the trading co. sought the ability to closely monitor power consumption. The company also sought a solution that would allow for the storage and analysis of power usage, the monitoring of environmental conditions and the ability to maximize circuit usage throughout multiple cabinets that were located in multiple rooms and multiple sites.

The optimal solution for this company to monitor and track data center power was made up of three parts, which included POPS (Per Outlet Power Sensing), PDUs (Power Distribution Units), Smart PDUs and Sentry Power Manager (SPM)., (Power Distribution Units), Smart Distribution Units (PDUs) Smart PDUs and Sentry Power Manager (SPM).

To determine actual power consumption for specific configurations of devices, the company launched the POPS PDU within the test lab environment. It wasn’t enough to trust nameplate power consumptions as real-world performance to monitor data center power was the key focus. The information gathered in the lab was then projected throughout the network so it could be used to develop anticipated consumption figures to compare with the actual PDU readings.

A local LED power meter was provided through the IP-addressable Smart PDU selected for each cabinet. This solution also offered a network interface with power, temperature and humidity. E-mail and SNMP-based alarms for defined thresholds ensured notification in the event data center power exceeded accepted levels. The solution delivered reliable power distribution to make the most of the power consumed throughout the organization.

The company also implemented the Sentry Power Manage to ensure access to global aggregate power usage data for all the PDUs on the entire network. This solution can also provide the company and its IT managers with trend reports on power information that includes kW and kw-hour as well as many more data center power and environmental metrics.

Today, the company is able to globally monitor its data center power and with the Sentry Power Manager, and enjoys the ability to easily monitor all of its power usage and environmental conditions throughout the world with Smart PDUs. The company can also store, graph and trend the data for future decision making.

As the company anticipates increases in trading demand in the future, decision makers can enjoy the confidence that the network can reliably and efficiently grow while data center power is effectively managed.