Raritan introduces Intelligent Rack PDUs with iX7 onboard controller

Raritan, a provider of intelligent data center management and rack power distribution solutions -- announced its next-generation intelligent power product portfolio. Powered by the new iX7 advanced controller, a new series of Raritan’s intelligent rack PDUs (iPDUs) now provides additional smart management capabilities that help future proof data center infrastructures.

Besides distributing power efficiently and reliably, Raritan intelligent rack PDUs with the new iX7 onboard controller provide more compute and memory power to support new applications and to gather and analyze data on electricity used by IT equipment, available power capacity in data centers, and cabinet environmental health. The new iPDUs also provide more sensing and infrastructure data collection points.

The new iPDUs deliver new uptime capabilities – including redundant networking and power sharing – and cost-cutting features, such as expanded iPDU cascading to reduce network implementation costs and costly IP ports and drops.

Sanjay Motwani, Regional Director, APAC - Raritan, said, “The ix7 controller offers many advantages, however a couple stand out from the Indian market perspective.

1) Dual Ethernet ports – In co-lo’s with dual ports (and one of them being a Gigabit port) there can now be two separate networks that both the customer and service provider can have access without having any security issues.

2) Expansion Port – this allows the controllers of primary & secondary PDU’s to be always powered on, thereby allowing a near 100% uptime to the environment & security sensors even if the power to one of the PDU fails”

IT equipment refreshes are occurring more frequently as data centers transform to meet new business and digital demands. “To keep pace and meet new evolving demands, Raritan has designed its controller – the brain of the iPDU – with more head room and more customization capabilities to support future user-defined applications,” says David Wood, Director of Power Solutions at Raritan.

“For example, for their edge data centers or colo locations, a customer may want to employ multi-level biometrics access authorization to open and close doors of remote cabinets -- our new iX7-powered iPDUs can enable that application,” adds Wood. “Or, a customer may want, at some point, to take advantage of faster network speeds -- our iPDU supports gigabit Ethernet. Whatever problem needs to be solved, our intelligent PDUs are versatile and powerful enough to handle new data center management applications – without needing to do a rip and replace of the power and monitoring infrastructure. ”

New iX7-enabled capabilities include:

· Redundant Power Sharing: Leveraging the typical dual-power feed design in a data center cabinet, a standard Cat5 cable can be used to connect the iX7 controllers of A- and B-side iPDUs. In case of a power loss to one of the feeds, the second iPDU powers both controllers and instant alerting of the power outage is sent; never losing connectivity to either iPDU. Downstream cascaded devices, including iPDUs and environmental sensors, will remain powered and be visible on the dashboard – helping improve mean time to repair and uptime.

· Dual Networking for Reliability and More Access Options: For high-availability connections and access, the Dual Networking feature enables users to connect to an iPDU from two distinct networks.

In addition, you can granularly define user access and permissions -- such as “Monitor Only Access” -- for each network, enabling additional authorized resources to help monitor power uptime and usage. For example, users can provide access to their iPDU and power data to a colocation provider on a separate network; without having to give access to the local area network.

· Extended Cascading by Mix and Matching USB and Ethernet Connections: Cut down on network implementation costs, including expensive IP drops, by sharing a single Ethernet port. Choose the best way to daisy chain up to eight PDUs using one of the two USB ports, or leverage the Gigabit Ethernet port for cascading.

. New Easy-to-Use HTML User Interface: Makes it easier to see data center power data and environmental information. The responsive web GUI can be accessed from any device or tablet, or directly from a desktop. The newly designed dashboard provides the most important information at your fingertips so you can easily see the health of your iPDU, as well as a cabinet’s power consumption history. It also provides easy-to-recognize alerting and alarm conditions in order to take action quickly and prevent potential outages.

· Highest-Resolution Color TFT Display: The bright display will change color depending on the alert level sensed by iPDUs; your field technicians can quickly identify the iPDUs where thresholds have been exceeded, get the correct power information right away, and act accordingly.