2016-04-05
As a PDU supplier, we have visited and inspected the central equipment rooms of many organizations. Most of them take power construction very seriously — UPS capacity and dual-feed power supply to the racks are usually done to a high standard. But at the same time, many overlook the details of power connections inside the rack, using ordinary power strips for power distribution. When a strip runs out of outlets, strips are daisy-chained layer upon layer, creating the kind of chaos seen in Figure 1. We once saw this in one organization's central equipment room: the total load of the equipment in a single rack exceeded 4,000 W, yet it ran on an ordinary household 10A / 250V / 2,500W power strip — daisy-chained three layers deep. It is hard to imagine how that room's administrator slept at night.
The servers, switches and data storage systems managed in a central equipment room carry the organization's critical business processes; some must run 7×24 without interruption, which raises the bar for the room's environment — cooling, racks and power alike. Every device in the room, primary or auxiliary, must be highly reliable and available. The power outlet is the gateway for every powered device: if it is unstable or lacks adequate protection, expensive electronic equipment can be destroyed — or the entire business system can collapse.
So what kind of outlet should guard that gateway? The answer is a PDU — short for Power Distribution Unit. Compared with ordinary power strips, a purpose-built rack PDU offers a more rational design, a wider range of outlet types, stricter quality standards, longer fault-free operation, leakage and overload protection, and durability that withstands frequent plugging and unplugging with minimal heat rise. It installs more flexibly and conveniently, and it eliminates at the root the safety hazards of ordinary strips — frequent outages, overheating and fire caused by poor contact or overloading. It also brings flexible control, ease of use and convenient intelligent management.
