Server Technology (News - Alert) has long made good on a variety of promises – such as offering 100 percent product performance testing and custom cabinet power distribution units (CDUs). But, the data center power monitoring leader wants everyone to know that it takes its ability to develop custom solutions even further: the company can make its products fit into any manufacturer’s cabinet, no matter the direction or challenge from the CDU end user
“I’d love to say we have an out of the box solution that fits everything and we do have a solution that can fit for a lot of them, but there are a lot of different cabinets out there,” Bruce Auclair, senior sales engineer for Server Technology told TMCnet. “The one thing that really stands out with Server Technology is although we do have some partners in the cabinet world, we don’t design our products for just one cabinet. We design our products with the intent that we can figure out how to make them work in just about anybody’s cabinet in most situations.”
Server Technology, a leader in data center power monitoring solutions, prides itself on being well aware that there are hundreds if not thousands of cabinet types and meets the challenge of trying to fit into everybody’s cabinets. Server Technology can create custom brackets to fit any need.
“We have the challenge that we need to try and fit into a lot of different cabinets in a lot of different ways and we offer the service and the expertise to do just that which you generally don’t find in a lot of other manufacturers that concentrate first on their cabinet sale and then secondarily on fitting their own CDU into their own cabinet,” Auclair said.
Some problems that Server Technology solves are with respect to horizontal gear in particular. For example, a lot of the Dell (News - Alert) PowerEdge servers have rapid rails which protrude out the back of the cabinet beyond the rear mounting rails by four to six inches. In these cases, it’s not an issue of whether the CDU can fit but, rather, if that CDU can coexist in the space with the other gear that needs to go in that cabinet. Server Technology addresses this need all the time for its customers.
Another problem that may arise is when a customer expresses a desire to have power on one side of the cabinet, either left or right, and data cabling on the other.
Problems like these inundate the Server Technology office, according to Auclair.
“It is a fairly continuous non-stop effort on our part because of the number of variables,” he said. “People think it is very simple but it’s not just the CDU and the cabinet, but it’s every other component that fits into that cabinet as well – from the actual horizontal servers to cable management options that a cabinet manufacturer offers.”
Customers who are also seeking ways to fit more power into their rack can also reap benefits from the data center power monitoring company.
Server Technology works to make a product recommendation to the customer that narrows that power distribution portion of it to the minimum of two enclosures, to two power surges.
“Just eight or 10 years ago, it was not uncommon to find people with six or eight circuits going to one cabinet, six to eight power strips, and that’s just not the way many people do things today,” Auclair said. “We tend to look to identify the requirements for the cabinet first and the gear that will be installed and provide a solution where just two power strips can accommodate the entire equipment list.”
Accordingly, Server Technology will emphasize that rather than bringing six power strips that are 20 amps a piece, once can bring in two power strips that are 50 or 60 amp three-phase.
“We attempt to identify the customer’s goals with respect to whether or not they intend redundancy and if they do intend circuit redundancy, we look for the solution that minimizes the number of circuits they need to bring to the cabinet – saving them money from an infrastructure point of view,” Auclair added.