Updated January 08, 2019 - Originally posted November 9, 2018

Are you faced with the challenge of selecting a rack PDU to meet not only your existing but also future power needs? Whether it’s for a refurbishment, new build, or retro-fit, when making such a purchase, you need to ensure you are maximizing your investment for the long-term - yes? But how does a data center manager feel secure in the knowledge that he has all potential future requirements covered? Short of gazing into a crystal ball and asking for some otherworldly guidance, there has been no simple answer to the question, ‘what will my future power needs be?’…until now.

The original purpose of this blog was to offer our readers a respite from the standard technical fare, but as you will see from the lines below, it took on a life of its own.  Our apologies in advance to the great poet Clement Clarke Moore, who penned the famous opening line “‘Twas the night before Christmas” almost two-hundred years ago. 

The idea that standardization benefits those of us in the data center space is neither new nor difficult to grasp.  Data center standardization is a reality that directly supports the uptime goals of your organization.  This applies wherever your PDU(s) are operating, like a colocation facility, corporate data center, or hyperscale complex.  You may wonder, then, how PDU power factors into this equation, let alone a small receptacle tucked into a PDU at the back of a rack?

How to keep up with the need to build out multiple data centers a day? Edge and cloud computing players such as Vapor IO are finding themselves with a daunting task – figuring out how to roll out 40,000 data centers at cell tower locations around North America. Partnering with fast, flexible suppliers offering short lead times and high production capacity is a key enabler for widespread micro/edge data centers as well as building hyperscale data centers.

That’s how we’d like you to think about Server Technology’s solutions.  In all the myriad ways your own mother looks after you, Server Technology is there for your business.  Just like your mother knew what you needed and when, often before you did, we can anticipate and meet the needs of your data center racks and everything on them.

While in previous blogs we’ve talked about the advantages of customization and having so many PDU options to choose from, now might be a good time to keep it simple.  Server Technology is in the business of meeting complex power needs for every customer’s equipment and data demands.  But we would be remiss if we didn’t address those needs in the simplest and most straightforward way possible.

On the surface, it is an amazingly simple question.  Everyone knows what a rack PDU is, don’t they?  In one of the few industry blogs to reference the movie Gremlins, we attempted to answer the question in the context of the acronym-laden industry we work in.  Power Distribution Unit.  In this blog we are going to move beyond semantics and talk more about the doing side of a PDU.

Let’s face it – sometimes things don’t go as planned.  While we pride ourselves on all of the work that goes into ensuring everything goes exactly right with our products, we also strive to provide the best support in case it doesn’t.  Server Technology has extensive on-line and live technical support services designed to make it easy to reach out when either you or your rack PDU needs a little extra attention.

At Server Technology, we are focused on making the process of identifying, selecting, and purchasing a rack PDU as simple as possible. (I mean, have you seen our Rack PDU Selection Wizard?)  Our dedication to support does not stop when the rack PDU ships.  In fact, that is when it begins.  Our technical support and resources even exceed the level of support we provided when you were just thinking about buying the rack PDU.