The Raritan Blog

How to Rapidly Configure Intelligent Rack PDUs

Henry Hsu
May 10, 2012

In the course of my consulting engagements with many enterprise clients, over the past few years, I have personally configured thousands and thousands of intelligent power strips for network deployment. Since “site services technician” is not part of my job description, you might wonder if perhaps I just have too much free time.

Quite the contrary. Instead, Raritan created a means to configure intelligent power strips (set the IP address, change time settings, set unique name, turn on SNMP, etc.)—in real-world environments—very rapidly and very easily. With minimal effort, a single person can configure hundreds of power strips in a single afternoon. The technique is unique and is likely surprising to most clients, so I’d like to take the time in this post to explain its methodology and rationale.

Many of our clients deploy significant quantities of intelligent power strips, in order to enable better energy management and capacity planning. Thus, Raritan is uniquely motivated to help deploy them quickly, because the value of the data provided by intelligent power strips can only be appreciated when the power strips are network-reachable. It pains me to visit facilities that have purchased networked power strips (of any brand), where the data center operators have not actually deployed their connectivity features due to reluctance to expend the tedious effort required to network them. These facilities are missing the tremendous business and operational value that metered PDUs deliver.