In May Raritan announced that Microsoft's Enterprise Engineering Centre (EEC) has chosen a suite of Raritan IT infrastructure management solutions for monitoring servers and their energy consumption down to the outlet level.
Located on the main Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, the state-of-the-art data centre contains more than $125 million in hardware and networking equipment, and houses multiple labs for Microsoft's enterprise customers to collaborate with product teams to test and validate Microsoft software solutions in replicas of customer production environments.
The EEC will use Raritan's remote access and control solutions - including Raritan's Dominion KX II KVM-over-IP switches and CommandCenter®Secure Gateway - to configure and transform each lab into a scaled representation of a customer's infrastructure. From any Web browser, administrators, as well as customers, will be able to control and configure servers and other IT equipment. The DKX2 provides secure BIOS-level access with Absolute Mouse Synchronization to servers and supports remote installation of software and diagnostics.
In addition, Raritan's new power management solutions will help customers analyse power consumption and cooling requirements for different server configurations. Servers in the labs will be plugged into Raritan's Dominion PX intelligent rack Power Distribution Units (iPDU), which measure power consumption at the outlet level. "With the Dominion PX we'll be monitoring daily the amount of amperage and watts drawn by each piece of equipment in our server racks," said Microsoft EEC Business Development Manager Steve Cole. "We also will be able to look at cooling and humidity statistics at the racks using the Dominion PX environmental sensors."
Raritan's PX iPDUs also will help the EEC find valuable free rack space by using real-time power draw information of equipment instead of relying upon nameplate data.
The infrastructure management solutions are available from Dueltek Computer Products