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Datacenter power options keep growing

With the datacenter moving towards on-demand, fully configurable, highly efficient power models, how many different types of physical power distruibution units will you need?
Written by David Chernicoff, Contributor

Power management is certainly a key issue for datacenters. The last year has seen the release of a relatively large number of applications and hardware designed for power optimization within the datacenter, as well as monitoring and management of power use and efficiency. So when I saw today's announcement that Server Technology had released 18 new solutions for datacenter power management, I was unsurprised.

After actually taking a few minutes to read the release I noticed, first, that these 18 new products were all types of cabinet power distribution units; that is they are all designed to be deployed in concert and likely in the same physical rack as the servers and storage in your datacenter. My first thought was  ‘that's a lot of different models" but I reasoned that there a number of very specific needs for power in the datacenter and deploying solutions specific to the power needs is a good idea.

But finishing the release brought me the information that there weren't simply 18 new units; Server Technology makes a point of identifying that there are actually 120 potential new CDUs when you combine the potential options available with each of the new units.

That's a lot of choices.                                 

It makes sense to be able to carefully tailor your power distribution to your power needs, so the large number of potential solutions offered by Server Technologies is a solution to efficiently meeting your power needs.  But it really seems to be a short term business model, regardless of their current business success. Just about every vendor that talks to me inserts the words ‘dynamic" and "on-demand" when discussing their deliverables, be they services or power. I'm sure that Server technology is well aware of the trend towards dynamic configuration and optimization for power management in the datacenter.  It's just that this announcement gives me pause with its focus on separate, discrete hardware configurations for specific datacenter issues.

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