Server Technology (News - Alert) is spreading the word that its latest version of its flagship offering, Sentry Power Manager (SPM), does not just boast a flashy new color and few upgrades. Rather, the SPM 5.0 is a fundamental design change within the product itself.
“I think it addresses things customers have wanted to see, it addresses a lot of new functionality that we have been anxious to put into the product and so all of that is rolled up into the 5.0 version,” Server Technology’s Senior Director of Software and Firmware Development Calvin Nicholson told TMCnet. “There were some customers who were waiting for 5.0, and it’s a game changing version of this software. We are going to see more and more installations and more and more success with it.”
SPM 5.0, touted as an “unbelievable solution” for rack-level data center power management, provides significant innovations. This single pane of glass view has the ability to manage an entire CDU network while providing measurement, monitoring and trending data at the rack level or device level, according to company officials.
SPM 5.0, which took about nine months to develop, offers an affordable solution that provides the critical power information from IT equipment that data center management needs to make informed decisions about power and energy use. The new SPM Version 5.0 is enhanced with an intuitive interface, world-class design and functionality, and improved CDU monitoring and management capabilities.
“We’ve made changes and upgrades over time but rarely do we really make radical changes to kind of revamp the look and feel,” Nicholson said. “What’s interesting is that a lot of people take the same product and then revamp the look and feel and call it new but the SPM 5.0 is a revamped look and feel that’s done to support new functionalities; it’s done for usability. It slices through the whole product and adds a lot more features and functions.”
Highlights of the SPM 5.0 include wild card searches, updated scheduling and network operations center (NOC (News - Alert)) views.
“The network operations center now is becoming more of a command and control center within the data center and so people want to see specific or key information up on a large screen in this control center,” Nicholson said. “With SPM 5.0 we can allow them to in seconds create custom NOC views and they can do it on alarm conditions, on alerts, on power and on environmental information. They can do it broken down by certain sections of their data centers, by a cabinet, or rows of cabinets, or a zone, or a location, and very quickly they can customize the views and the information that they are seeing using this new section that we have in 5.0.”
Some other key functions of SPM 5.0 include: monitoring of competitive CDUs from APC, Geist, Raritan (News - Alert) and others; global views of the entire data center floor and CDUs; the ability to manage thousands of CDUs from a single console; secure Web based access, anytime, anywhere central location for alarms; tracking of active alarms and alarm history; and logs for discovery, user actions and logins, among other things.
One of the more interesting features of SPM 5.0 is the circuit features in which branch circuits can be rolled up from the remote power panels or the power distribution units and provide three-phase load balancing across an individual cabinet, rows of cabinets or the whole data center floor – something that leads to cost savings and increased efficiency within that data center, according to Nicholson.
During its beta testing, SPM 5.0 was used by some of the largest financial companies in the world and a global telecommunications company and the response was overwhelming.
“It really addressed some of their concerns and the features and functions that they wanted in managing the large amounts of data that are coming in and managing the large number of units that they have inside the Sentry Power Manager system to give them information on efficiency, power usage and information to be able to run their data center,” Nicholson said.