Oct 6 2010
RF Code Inc and Raritan revealed that they have merged RF Code’s wire free monitoring solutions along with Intelligent Rack PDUs manufactured by Raritan resulting in a wireless solution including RF Code’s active RFID firmware and software and Raritan’s RF-Code-Ready PX series of rack PDUs, that helps in measuring and observing power consumption of a single server and other equipments, and quantifies humidity and temperature at the racks.
Day by day power seems to become dearer, and also outruns the price of the hardware used in data centers. Hence the center must look for solutions to take this issue. Furnishing a data center with monitoring solutions that also absorbs power usage data is part and parcel of the effort. This monitoring solution is very easy to deploy, rapidly helps racks to be instrumented for power monitoring, and makes redundant the use of costly, wired Ethernet connections. The RF Code sensor tag just needs to be plugged into a Raritan PDU and the system becomes active. IP address association, configuration and maintenance is not needed. The RF code tag immediately starts amassing data from the PDU, and transmits it via an RFID system over the air.
According to Henry Hsu, Raritan’s Director (Power Management Architecture), by using this integrated device, customers receive the benefit of a trustworthy wireless power monitoring solution for the data center. The data gathered by the device would help them to manage power in a more efficient and cost-effective way, by giving them the ability to foresee problems before they need costly means of resolving them.
RF Code’s CEO, Mitch Medford, stated that the integrated and innovative solution facilitates data centers to be run more efficiently than ever before.
The RF Code R170PDU tag is plugged into a specific port on Raritan’s Dominion PS rack PDU. The sensor then accumulates data such as RMS Current, active and apparent power-breaker status, and RMS voltage from the PDU and sends the data to a RF code reader, Sensor Manager Software. The Sensor Manager organizes the information, and also calculates supplementary computations about power usage, and then gives the clients a total picture of the power consumption in their facility. The sensor manager can be used by clients, by utilizing map and live table views, interactive and scheduled graphing and reporting and thresholding and alerting options.