Revolutionizing the Intelligent PDU: Introducing the All-New Raritan PX4 Rack PDU

Nicholas Polk
May 1, 2023

Raritan’s new intelligent rack power distribution unit employs groundbreaking, innovative technology to enhance visibility.   

If you walk into a dark room to find something, you wouldn’t want to use the flashlight on your phone to look around – you’d turn on the lights.    

Many mission-critical facility managers, however, need more infrastructure to turn on the lights when a problem arises. They’re stuck with the flashlight or, worse: a candle. In extreme cases, they must fumble blindly, hoping to discover what happened.   

Electrical reliability and power quality are critical for data centers to run efficiently and avoid costly downtime. When downtime costs are measured in six or even seven figures, you want to do everything possible to prevent and minimize such occurrences. Moreover, higher power costs, increased electrical demand, and growing emphasis on carbon footprint reduction make innovative and effective power monitoring ever more necessary throughout a data center’s entire power chain.    

At Raritan, we have launched a new intelligent power rack distribution, monitoring, and control solution so facility managers are always aware of the situation. The PX4 is the ideal intelligent PDU, providing unrivaled visibility into your data center operations beyond the capabilities of current intelligent PDU solutions. The result is a solution that meets today’s power needs and anticipates future rack power distribution challenges.   

Power Quality Challenges

Generally speaking, an outage is thought of as something that occurs in the grid outside the facility, but data center hardware itself can be the source of disruptions. Data centers employ a variety of equipment that requires clean and reliable power. All this equipment – from fans to pumps to lighting ballasts – can distort a facility’s available power waveform. This can cause sags, transients, and harmonics, leading to unreliable and inefficient infrastructure. For example, non-linear switch mode power supplies used for servers, switches, and storage systems can emit harmonics into the power distribution infrastructure. It’s imperative to monitor mission-critical hardware to ensure it is running efficiently and not causing problems that could disrupt your data center operations.    

Safeguarding uptime and driving greater operational efficiencies requires a multi-dimensional measurement that weighs sags, swells/surges, total harmonic distortion, and other complications so you can compare the actual measurements to the ideal. This allows you to find the true power quality in a facility down to the branch or device. Harmonics can make equipment unreliable, cause downtime, and lead to higher energy costs. Harmonic currents can also cause false power circuit breaker trips, causing downtime. Resolving a tripped breaker is a tedious, slow-moving process. You’ve got to find the source of the trip, which can be daunting with a vast network connected to scores of devices. This could involve unplugging every device on a circuit and powering them up one by one until another trip occurs, allowing you to pinpoint the culprit. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could look at a dashboard and see the outlet that caused the breaker to trip? That’s one area our new intelligent rack PDU brings visibility to and more power-quality data to help keep systems optimally functioning.    

Our Solution

Our Xerus Firmware gives insight into advanced power quality metrics with waveform capture and measures total harmonic distortion, voltage, and current. It also provides enhanced circuit breaker forensics. At +/- 0.5%, we set a new industry best for accuracy, cutting variance in half compared to the industry standard. Our intelligent rack PDU can help with capacity planning, workload optimization, and failover planning. It also supports proactive and reaction uptime/troubleshooting initiatives. With the ability to monitor power at the outlet, you have real-time access to the granular data needed to improve efficiency and decrease the need to make manual changes at the rack.     

The PX4 is easy to deploy and adapt to IT configurations. A key feature is our Cx Outlets, a game-changing innovation compatible with C13 and C19 outlets. A single PDU can cover numerous applications, allowing for extreme flexibility and improved efficiency. The 45-degree angled infeed provides a universal connection, whether input power comes from the top or bottom of the cabinet. Having the right outlets in the right locations guarantees installations are flexible and meet shifting outlet requirements. The new design also enables high-density power distribution, allowing more outlets in a smaller space. Having the correct number, type, and configuration of outlets facilitates enhanced density so users get what they need while saving money on PDU and infrastructure costs.   

Our new intelligent rack PDU also promises enhanced uptime safeguards, with our RamLock mechanical locking mechanism lowering accident risk-our iX™controller also offers a myriad of other features to support uptime. These include failover power, which provides redundancy so power keeps running even if a PDU fails, and linking, which gives data on all expansion units to the primary PDU.    

Security is paramount to maintaining the integrity of these systems. We deployed the most robust security features so only the right people have the level of access and control that they should. We employ TACACS+, encryption, firewalls, and all other safeguards to keep bad actors out. 

The PX4 won’t require significant upgrades or changes to integrate with existing systems. It can seamlessly connect with the DCIM or BMS solutions you already have at your facility, regardless of whether they were built in-house or by a third party. Collecting and transmitting valuable data gathered at the outlet, rack, and environment around the PDU has never been simpler.    

For in-depth information on all the capabilities of the new PX4, visit - https://www.raritan.com/products/power/power-distribution/rack-pdu