A critical facility will have many different pieces of equipment that require electricity
and getting power to all of them is no easy feat.
That’s why there are power distribution units.
A power distribution unit, or PDU, is a device with multiple outlets designed to distribute
electricity.
This kind of thing is especially important to critical facilities like data centers that
require reliable, clean power to be spread out among a large number of server racks and
HVAC equipment.
Monitoring your PDU for power management can improve a facilities efficiency, uptime, and
growth.
There are two, primary types of PDUs that you might see in a critical facility.
Rack mount PDUs and cabinet PDUs.
Types of rack mounted PDUs can vary wildly from very simple and cheap rack-mounted power
strips to much larger solutions, feature rich solutions.
More advanced, rack mounted solutions offer features such as power filtering, load balancing,
and remote monitoring via LAN.
Advantages to using rack mounted PDUs include being able to monitor power at the inlet and
outlet, as well as on the PDU branch circuit level and it allows for support for environment
sensors.
Sometimes, for more power hungry applications like multiple server cabinets, a larger PDU
solution is necessary like a cabinet PDU.
Stand-alone, cabinet PDUs are self-contained units that include main breakers, individual
circuit breakers, and power monitoring panels.
The cabinet also provides for grounding via internal bus bars.
As you can now tell, power distribution units are vital in mission critical environments.
Feel free to leave a message with how your facility utilizes PDUs in the comments below.