ServerTech Blog - Information for the Data Center Equipment Manager

Imagine this…

It’s 3:13 in the morning and you’re awakened from a pleasant slumber by the beeping, whirring sound of your cell phone. It’s the data center. Notifying you that you’ve lost grid power and your UPS has gone on battery back-up.

While you stand there in your terry robe and fuzzy bunny slippers contemplating crawling back into your nice warm bed, time is ticking away for critical devices before they lose power completely.

As you throw on a wrinkled pair of jeans and yesterday’s t-shirt you’re calculating the time in your head. You know your UPS will last for 37 minutes on the current draw from your devices. You know it’s at least a 10 minute drive to the data center, 17 minutes total by the time you step foot inside.

You know this, because you’ve done all this before.

That gives you right around 20 minutes to safely shed all of your non-critical devices to expand the run-time of your UPS.

With very little traffic on the road at this hour your mind begins to wander. You wonder why the power dropped off this time. You picture a squirrel playing a tragic game of hop-scotch in a transformer field as you’re tires screech to a halt in the parking lot.

You check your watch as you flip on the lights in the data center. Twenty minutes remaining. You grab your keys and head for the cabinets…

WAIT!

What if this entire scenario never had to happen? What if you could expand the run time of your UPS by shedding non-critical devices while you sleep? Sound like a sweet dream?

With our cabinet power distribution units and smart load shedding feature, your CDU can communicate with your UPS. It will know when the UPS switches to battery, and with a little bit of configuration it can shed non-critical devices. You can also couple that with our remote shutdown agent, which will initiate a shutdown command to your servers before removing power.

All of which could save you hours of sleep and keep your systems running, while the public works electrician cleans up fried squirrel at 3:30 in the morning.

To find out more information, read our white paper “Smart Load Shedding Ensures Uptime”.

Where Are All the Custom Scripts?

We've heard customers talk about writing custom scripts to perform a variety of functions on their CDUs. Things such as updating the firmware on a group of CDUs. So we're a little surprised none have been posted.

We know you're out there! We know your checking out the blog! It's time to stop lurking and start posting!

Server Technology: A Look Inside

Processor magazine has a very nice article about Server Technology on it's website and marked us as "A Company to Watch". It will also appear in the print issue, Vol.29 Issue 10.

Server Technology: A Look Inside

Cisco Moves to Take Over the (Data Center) World

This week Cisco made two very powerful moves to secure a top position in the data center market. Earlier in the week it was reported that Cisco will purchase Neopath Networks and just today they have announced they will acquire WebEx.

So, why would a hardware manufacturer purchase two software companies? Well, there's a couple of reasons. Let's look at them a little bit closer.

Infrastructure Sprawl Will Slow
We've reported a couple of times on the cost of corporate data center expansion, including the fact that some companies are even moving their data center operations to remote parts of the country to escape expensive land, construction, and power costs. That's a great option for those that can afford it. However, many businesses simply can't. So more pressure is being placed on them to get more out of their current infrastructure. Virtualization technology will continue to help them accomplish this, but we know what vitrualization will do to power demands. Therefore, Cisco will see sales from hardware slow as infrastructure sprawl slows.

Net is the Platform
The dawn of the network as a platform is upon us. I'm sure anyone can generate a list of a dozen enterprise applications that run on the network and more are on their way. These acquisitions bring the total to 7, just this year, for Cisco. Proving they have every expectation of furthering the  concept of net based  productivity tools.

What do you think? What can you add to this list?

Ask The Engineer - Can I control my Power Towers with my Cisco Router?

Question from Dan Seoane of Covad:  I want to control my powertowers from my Cisco Router with NM32 async card.  Are there any special settings I need to make?  The async ports are setup and working already.

Engineer reply:  The only things necessary for success are matching asynchronous settings and the proper cable connection.  Per the default settings of the Sentry Power Towers, the proper async settings are 9600 baud, no parity, eight (8) data bits, one (1) stop bit and no flow control.  Higher data rates are supported but keeping the rate at 9600 baud is recommended since bootup messages from the Sentry system are always sent at this rate.  Regarding cable pinouts, the Sentry Power Tower units contain two serial ports.  One port is DB9M and the other is an RJ45 type.  The RJ45 jack should be used because its pinouts properly match the pinouts of the RJ45 plug ends of the Cisco NM 32 Octal-Async cables.  Final note is that the DTR output signal from the Cisco must be asserted to allow a Sentry session to start and should be de-asserted when the connection is ended.