The Raritan Blog

Complimentary passes available for end users for the October 16th DCD Chicago show

Dorothy Ochs
October 9, 2012

End users are invited to attend the upcoming DatacenterDynamics Chicago on October 16th. Attend our presentation featuring Bank of Canada and stop by our booth to see our latest solutions and enter a raffle drawing for a new iPad. Simply contact us.

Presentation Details

Time: 12:50 - 13:30
Location: Hall 2
Speakers: Jeff Birch (Senior IT Principal Consultant, Bank of Canada) & Khaled Nassoura
Title: This is the real deal, a real-world experience of a financial institution choosing and implementing a DCIM solution.
Abstract: There has been a lot of buzz, hype, and confusion around DCIM (data center infrastructure management) software that has been created by both vendors and industry analysts in the past year. In this session, you will learn directly from data center architects and managers how they went about selecting a DCIM solution suite to bridge the gap between facilities and IT, streamline the process for moves/adds/changes, increase asset tracking accuracy, and reduce costs in their data center

Event Website: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/conferences/2012/chicago-2012

The Power to Change Data Center Power Management

October 4, 2012

A recent article in the New York Times, Power, Pollution and the Internet by James Glanz, took a hard look at data center power practices.

In contrast to the article’s assumption around energy, we know that data centers are clamoring for more efficient ways to manage their power usage - it’s their number one expense. If you don’t mind taxing the Internet to download about 100 terabytes of data, Google the phrase “data center power management.” You’ll see at least 20 companies vying to offer solutions for power management software. With demand comes invention. For instance, intelligent power distribution units (iPDUs) that help data center managers get incredibly granular information that lets them:

Make informed capacity planning decisions
Efficiently utilize power resources
Improve uptime and staff productivity
Save power and money
Measure PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and drive green data center initiatives

As a measure of interest in this area, keyword searches on Google around data center energy management were over 720+, data center energy were over 2,900 and combinations of these terms fell into the 3000+ over the past 30 days. The vast majority of these would have been data center leaders looking for help to solve the problem the New York Times article wrote about.

If that many people are looking to solve the issue every 30 days, and if inventive companies like Raritan are working on solutions, then the outlook for the data management industry isn’t bleak - more very engaged and aware.

SeaMicro SM15000: Data Center in a Box for Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and Big Data

Herman Chan
October 2, 2012

After being acquired by AMD earlier this year for $334M, SeaMicro™ has recently introduced the SM15000™, packing gobs of compute, networking, and storage in a 10U box. With a design focus on flexibility, density, and energy efficiency for virtualization, cloud computing, and big data loads, the SM1500 offers your choice of up to 64 AMD Opteron™, up to 64 Intel® Xeon® (“Ivy Bridge”, “Sandy Bridge”), and up to 256 Intel Atom® processors. When the folks at SeaMicro say “data center in a box”, they mean it. The AMD SeaMicro SM15000 server doesn’t fall short on memory nor storage, supporting up to 4 terabytes (TB) of RAM — 64 GB per Piledriver processor — and up to 64 SATA drives. Network connectivity is provided by up to (16) 10 GbE ports or up to (64) 1 GbE connections. Freedom Fabric Storage provides scaling for up to 1,408 solid state or hard disk drives.

So how do we power such a beast? While it supports up to 10 1100 watt power supplies, AMD suggests that the average power consumption of a fully-loaded system is in the range of 3200 watts. That means a 42U rack full of them will require ~12,800 watts (12.8kW). Since most customers will opt for the 10 power supplies in a 5+5 configuration, the iPDU in the rack will require a minimum of 20 outlets. Some customers may even go more extreme and drop 5 of them in a 54U rack, which will require iPDUs supporting 16kW and a minimum of 25 outlets. At these power densities, your only real options would be to run 50A 208V 3 phase circuits (14.4kW) to the rack or 60A 208V 3 phase circuits (17.3kW) or 30A 400V 3 phase circuits (16.6kW). Check out our iPDU product selector to find the one that suits you best. Search for the ones with C13 outlets.

The density war continues….

Herman Chan
September 28, 2012

I read today that HP released its Proliant DL560 Gen8 Server Series with support for 4 Intel Xeon® CPUs, each CPU supporting 8, 6, or 4 cores. In addition, up to 1.5 TB of memory and 5 hot plug drives are supported. And, to boot, you get ALL this in a compact 2U package. That’s a lot of horsepower to help support increasing virtualized workloads.

Now, how would you power such a beast? Well, it comes with a pair of 1200W highly efficient 80 Plus rated power supplies. If you decide that you want to pack 20 of them in a 42U rack, you’d need to provision about 16KW of power to each rack in a rack iPDU with at least 20 C13 outlets. How did we get to 16KW? We made a simple assumption that the server may run @ 65% of nameplate or ~780 watts. 780 watts x 20 servers is just about 16KW. Your mileage will vary depending on what you decide to use as a nameplate de-rating assumption. Typical ranges fall somewhere between 60-70%. Given this, your choices to power a rack full of these will likely be one of 2 options depending on whether you’ve got 208V 3 phase or 400V 3 phase coming into the cabinets. They are: (A) a pair of 208V, 3 phase, 60A rack iPDUs providing 17.3KW of power or (B) a pair of 400V, 3 phase, 30A rack iPDUs providing 16.6KW of power. Check out our iPDU product selector to find the one that suits you.