How Having a USB Port on a Rack PDU Is both Unremarkable and Extraordinary

Michael Bord
July 23, 2014

Every Raritan intelligent rack PDU comes equipped with USB ports that allow users to perform a variety of amazing tasks. But, for some reason, USB ports don’t fill most people with much excitement. The USB port has become the technology analog to vanilla, or at the very least to claiming that a ‘thing’ is vanilla: bland, commonplace, and ordinary. It was developed back in 1994 by a computing giant's roster that included: Compaq, Dell, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft; all of whom had the goal of providing an easier way to connect external devices to personal computers.  

Up until then, vendors had struggled with usability issues stemming from disparate interfaces and the limitations of having to configure a port to serve a specific device. If you’re roughly over 30, or into collecting the monstrous dust-covered towers of yesteryear, you know that prior to USB, the back of the PC looked like a series of orderly trapezoid-shaped pincushions that were a pain to hook your peripheral devices’ cables into.

Thankfully USB 1.0 took off at the start of 1996, the limitations of serial ports were overcome and the rest is history (although I still sometimes struggle to find right-side-up when connecting my devices into a USB port, and I suspect most laypeople do). Today the USB port is everywhere: phones, computers, televisions, your car, your household appliances, etc… Maybe someday you’ll have one implanted in your arm that allows you to insert a Flash drive and reminisce over pictures of junior high that appear before your very eyes.

So, it’s no wonder the surplus of USB ports leads us to believe it is mundane, when in fact, it makes so much of our technology-driven lives possible. It’s also why it’s easy to overlook the significance of the presence of USB ports on Raritan’s intelligent rack power distribution units.

Raritan’s remote power strips feature USB ports that afford a great deal of versatility. They allow for quick and easy setups, help to improve the physical security of your racks and eliminate the need for vast amounts of networking infrastructure. This alone may not even seem impressive, lest you consider the aggregate effect of being able to scale this in the most massive and complex facilities. These are just a few of the reasons USB ports on rack mount power strips are quite remarkable after all.

Download 5 Benefits of Having USB Ports on Your Rack PDUs to learn how data centers have saved hundreds of thousands by using the USB ports located on Raritan iPDUs.