Intelligent CIO North America Issue 05 | Page 82

FINAL WORD

Raritan : Powering data centre performance to maximise enduser efficiency

Paul Mott , Global Technical Product Manager of Power Solutions at Raritan , tells us how the company is helping end-users drive automation in the data centre , offering ‘ Swiss Army Knife ’ adaptability with its Smart Rack Controllers solution and providing the ‘ godsend ’ of remote monitoring to prevent downtime .

cCan you tell me what challenges data centre operators are

facing when it comes to tracking their many devices ?
The traditional approach using hand scanners and things of that nature to track devices throughout an organisation has been used for a long time and there ' s nothing wrong with it . The only challenge is there is a lot of human intervention that needs to happen . Humans are imperfect beings so anytime a human touches something there ' s always that opportunity for an error to happen . What we ' re seeing is a kind of shift towards a more automated way to manage and track assets and you need to consider some of the value that you can get out of that – things like being able to do widescale audits very quickly without deploying a whole team of people into various enterprise locations to be able to track things , and being able to do it remotely from a console that could be somewhere across an ocean or on the opposite side of the world . So there are tons of advantages to re-evaluating the traditional way that an organisation may track its assets , although it ' s still fundamentally a key aspect of a lot of organisations . There ' s opportunity for optimization moving forward .
How have the data centre management requirements changed over recent years ?
Primarily from the power side of things we ' re seeing an increase in density pretty much across the board and it just continues to go up . We ' re seeing typical enterprises and even colos , and really all types of data centre environments , having this challenge where they need to put more equipment into the same footprint that they ' ve had before . And they ' re having to work out whether or not they need to use
82 INTELLIGENTCIO NORTH AMERICA www . intelligentcio . com