Are Your Legacy PDUs Putting You at Risk?

Posted on November 15, 2017 by Gento

Data center downtime can have a catastrophic effect on your daily business and direct impact to your organization. According to one study, they found an astounding 93% of all enterprises who suffer from data center downtime for more than 10 days file for bankruptcy within a year. This is in large part because of the costs associated with downtime being so high. The Ponemon Institute estimates the average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute and $336,000 per hour.

Unfortunately, these are precisely the kinds of consequences you're looking at if you allow your data center to continue to run on legacy IT equipment, especially vital PDUs. PDUs are designed for uptime and efficiency - two things that help mitigate risks associated with the types of disasters that lead to failures. If your PDUs can’t immediately communicate power failures, alert for other operational malfunctions, or provide you with real-time, accurate power capacity information your entire data center (as well as its customers, and your reputation) could be in jeopardy.

The Major Dangers of Legacy PDUs

The problem with relying on legacy PDUs doesn't just have to do with placing your faith in outdated technology. It is about not having the type of real-time visibility you need into what is really going on. This leaves you exposed to a number of scenarios, all of which could be incredibly harmful to your long-term operations:

• Unreliable Power
• Wasteful Overprovisioning
• Inefficient Energy Usage
• Tedious/Costly Power Metering
• Zero Access to Rack-Level Data
• Negatively Impacted Performance
• Downtime

Data center management is under constant pressure to keep up with the demands of modern technology and users from almost every angle. Clients and users expect not only agility but accurate reporting and full transparency, as well. Clients want higher levels of reliability and security while always looking for the lowest cost available in order to get there. Power, density, and energy costs are becoming less predictable and throughout all of it, the impending risk of downtime still persists.

Legacy PDUs make it impossible to address any of these goals properly, let alone all of them at the same time.

The Key Benefits of Intelligent PDUs

Getting rid of your legacy equipment and making the switch to intelligent PDUs, like those available from Raritan, allows you to address essentially all of these concerns.

For starters, Intelligent PDUs are reliable by design. Unlike the legacy equipment that you're currently using, they're engineered to prevent downtime with features like advanced alarming and rapid remediation. They're also easy to use, which facilitates rapid deployment by either standard USB or TFTP via Wi-Fi or network connection. This leads to a logical, cost-effective network, which gives way to the most important benefit of all: immediate access to your data. Intelligent PDUs allow you to make the best, most informed, and straightforward decisions possible given the present challenges.

Another unique aspect is the future-proof architecture, which contributes towards making sure that expensive downtime is a situation you do NOT find yourself in the near future. They're a product of advanced engineering and are designed to not only fit perfectly in your rack but any rack. They also offer benefits like the support of a sustainable power chain design and high interoperability.

In an environment where costs are already so high, like data centers, it’s natural for organizational leaders to want to increase their return on investment for existing assets as much as possible. Therefore, it’s common to see legacy PDUs in operation that are well past their operational prime. However, by doing so the entire operation is at risk to a wide range of dangers. Aside from the comparatively "little" problems that you're likely to encounter on a day-to-day basis, all roads in this scenario lead to the biggest consequence of all: unpredictable and regular downtime.

Intelligent PDUs, on the other hand, put organizations in the best possible position to both keep up with the rapidly changing demands of today as well as better preparing themselves for what the entire industry might look like tomorrow and beyond. To learn more about our intelligent PDUs solutions visit our PX PDU page.