Each year I visit many datacenters all over the world, where I enjoy witnessing everything from the sleekest state-of-the-art technology, to a batch of NT servers wrapped together seemingly with duct tape. The ingenuity of infrastructure managers never fails to amaze me, and so I love visiting customers.
About a year ago, I found myself in an extremely high-end facility where a remote KVM solution based upon Raritan’s Dominion KX II product was recently deployed. A newly-built datacenter, this facility would feel at home in a Hollywood movie: its aisles were pristine, its technology robust, its operational processes well-developed, and basically it just looked cool.
I asked the project manager, “Of the millions of dollars you spent populating this new datacenter; what product do you think gave you the most bang for the buck?” I, of course, expected him to single out Raritan’s incredible technology but, hey, I’m biased. After only a few seconds, he said, “The 1 foot power cords.”
You see, nearly every hardware vendor ships their products with 6 foot AC power cords. (Raritan is no exception — with our Dominion KX II switches we even ship two... one for each redundant power supply.) In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find any mass product with anything except a 6 foot power cord. But in the modern data center, where network cables are custom cut to size, the power cord remains a blight on the eyes — but much more importantly, a detriment to efficient cooling. It doesn’t take a lot of 6 foot power cords to clutter the back of the rack and reduce airflow efficiency.
Raritan will be saying a lot in the near-future about the need for employing best practices in your data center’s energy utilization. But for just $2 (and almost certainly cheaper in bulk), you can make a reasonable dent in increasing the air flow at the back of the rack, simply by employing a better-fitting AC power cord. The project manager who made this suggestion purchased a large stash of 1 foot, 1.5 foot, and 3 foot lengths. Each time he deploys new gear, he simply selects the best length — which is almost never the stock 6 foot length. A low-tech solution to a high-tech problem.
Do you have any other hints of your own? We’d love to hear from you. |