While use of vertical PDUs, or vertical rack power distribution units, has become nearly ubiquitous in today’s data center, they are not the only game in town.  Since we have been getting a lot of questions lately about Horizontal rack PDUs, we thought it would be useful to take moment to pause and reflect on our counterpart from the other axis.

As a data center administrator, one of the most important parts of your job — besides maintaining uptime and staying under budget — involves monitoring and managing your department’s resources. It’s your responsibility to make sure that your data center is fully capable of meeting the current and future needs of your enterprise and its changing customer base.

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up some place else.”  – Yogi Berra

Today’s data center managers are looking for cost-effective, reliable and hassle-free ways to aggregate all of their key measurement points in an effort to maximize uptime, improve efficiency and analyze capacity. As far as data center tools go, there’s none more versatile than Sentry Power Manager, the award-winning data center management solution from Server Technology.

It’s never fun to lose sleep over a problem, but night after night, many of us toss and turn, worrying about the things both within our control and beyond it. For the folks who run data centers, it’s no different.

PRO2 Hot Swap Network Card

Pardon the pun, but the origin of the phrase, “getting your ducks in a row,” is a little, well, fuzzy. It’s not clear whether the term comes from hunting, sports or - most likely - the practice of mother ducks encouraging their babies to line up in a row before heading to the pond. Either way, having one’s proverbial ducks in a row is nearly always a good idea before undertaking a sizable project. Take, for example, capacity planning in a new build. That’s one situation where you don’t want to jump in head first without a solid plan.