Rising power demands and the global initiative of reducing carbon footprints make measuring all aspects of a data center’s rack power critical in supplying highly available, reliable power. Beyond the actual power the rack uses, power quality measurement details can troubleshoot sources of power issues such as distortions and variations. These measurements can increase energy efficiencies, improve availability, and manage the existing capacity of the entire data center. Because data centers require an extremely high degree of electrical availability and reliability, an awareness of power quality issues and how to address them―down to the rack or device level―is necessary to protect from downtime’s prohibitive costs. As rack power quality patterns become recognizable over time, a long-term monitoring strategy can help find what processes are leading to a critical situation to help prevent similar cases.

Trending data from the Uptime Institute’s research shows that data center outages cost more, and the stakes are only rising. Electrical reliability and rack-level power quality are becoming a critical part of solving a data center’s downtime prevention equation. However, many data centers are still risking their bottom lines because they lack advanced intelligent rack power distribution unit (PDU) based metering for monitoring and addressing power quality issues at the rack (and device) level.