IDC Link Report

New iPDU from Raritan is a Building Block for Smarter Data Centers

iPDU Link Report from IDC previewIDC has observed increasing investment in smarter datacenter solutions as organizations strive to support digital transformation initiatives that require much greater agility in datacenter resources. The ability to support new workloads quickly and where they are needed with a high degree of security and remote visibility and control is becoming a competitive differentiator.

Considering the challenges that organizations face in improving the speed of IT service delivery while reducing downtime, infrastructure that enables more autonomous and intelligent management — such as Raritan's new family of iPDUs — will be well received in the market…

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Raritan's New iPDU Is a Building Block for Smarter Datacenters

March 21, 2017
By: Jennifer Cooke

IDC's Quick Take
On March 14, Raritan, a brand of Legrand, announced a new portfolio of intelligent power products. Based on Raritan's new iX7 controller, the intelligent rack power distribution units (iPDUs) gather and analyze data on electricity that IT devices consume and drive better coordination and security across the IT resources and the critical facilities infrastructure that supports them.

Product Announcement Highlights
Raritan's iX7-powered iPDUs provide datacenter operators better visibility into energy consumption, power capacity, and environmental conditions, as well as the status of PDUs, lines, circuit breakers, and individual outlets. Based on the Xerus technology platform, the new family of iPDUs leverages a more powerful ARM Cortex-A5 microprocessor to provide better capabilities for built-in security as well as an open architecture that allows customers to interface with different tools, such as DCIM, and support new applications. One of the top goals of iX7 is to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) in outages with iX7 Power Share.

While the ability to improve remote visibility and better support IT workloads is a top driver for investment in more intelligent power infrastructure, a more immediate and cost-saving benefit of Raritan's iPDUs is the ability to reduce IP port costs by leveraging iPDU cascading. With a typical network port costing $300–500, the ability to use one drop and daisy chaining PDUs to enable connectivity will be appealing.

The ability to retrofit an existing traditional datacenter into a smarter datacenter is possible using intelligent power equipment. Instrumenting an existing datacenter can be accomplished by installing Raritan's branch circuit metering solution for power metering.

Other highlights of the announcement include:

  • Native support for Gigabit Ethernet so that customers can upgrade their network without replacing their PDU infrastructure
  • Dual access to the iPDU to enable permission-controlled access (This feature is useful for colocation providers that may want to grant metering capabilities to end customers or for IT and facilities organizations that may want to have separate networks to maintain power infrastructure. The dual networking feature also can be used for network redundancy and remote locations.)

 

IDC's Point of View
IDC has observed increasing investment in smarter datacenter solutions as organizations strive to support digital transformation initiatives that require much greater agility in datacenter resources. The ability to support new workloads quickly and where they are needed with a high degree of security and remote visibility and control is becoming a competitive differentiator. Considering the challenges that ©2017 IDC #lcUS42397917 2 organizations face in improving the speed of IT service delivery while reducing downtime, infrastructure that enables more autonomous and intelligent management — such as Raritan's new family of iPDUs — will be well received in the market.

Raritan is not new to the remote management and control arena. Back in 1985, the company began developing keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) switches that enabled IT personnel to remotely manage IT infrastructure. As organizations utilize more edge datacenter resources to support digital transformation and IoT initiatives, the ability to remotely manage and control datacenter infrastructure will become a must-have feature. Infrastructure such as Raritan's iX7-powered iPDUs will be an integral building block for smarter datacenters.