Why Some IT Equipment Racks Need High Power Deployments

The evolution of the current data center infrastructure has allowed many organizations to deploy new types of workloads, support more users, and enhance their overall business model. Now, we have virtualization, big data, and a lot more cloud computing. Although this has certainly allowed the business entity to do a lot – it also puts additional resource strain on your data center environment.

Still, many data center managers are doing a good job conserving energy – decreasing PUE, raising data center temperatures, using air-side economizers to reduce energy consumption for cooling – but average power consumption at the rack is still going up. In fact, the increased efficiency means more power is available for servers to support data center growth. Data centers are finding that they must deploy more and more power to their racks. Why is this happening? Data center managers are deploying more and more power to their IT equipment racks to keep up with power-hungry devices.

According to this whitepaper from Raritan, nearly half (49%) of the data center managers polled had a maximum rack power density of 12kW or less. Their expectations were that two years later, only one-third (33%) would have a maximum rack power density of 12kW or less. Some data centers today have racks wired to provide as much as 30kVA.

In this whitepaper, we quickly learn the key considerations surrounding the deployment of high power into modern IT equipment racks. Remember, when considering power demand, it is important to determine and design for peak actual demand. Designing to IT equipment nameplate ratings is excessively high. Designing for average power consumption may not be sufficient for periods of peak demand.

Download this whitepaper today to learn about the necessary aspects around high power deployments. This includes:

As the modern data center continues to evolve and take on more complex workloads – it’ll be critical to evaluate power requirements and deployment best practices. Whether you operate a large, a medium or even a small data center, it may be time for you to consider deploying high power to at least some of your racks. Here’s the reality - High-density racks can be deployed in small, medium or large data centers. Even in Raritan’s data center, they’ve increased temperature set points to where their cooling capacity has increased to support higher density rack loads. All of these efficiencies and power controls will help create a more optimally run data center – meeting both today’s and tomorrow’s demands.