Raritan has announced new power management capabilities for its award-winning Intelligent Rack Transfer Switch that helps data centers keep equipment operating through power failures and provides insights on energy usage and rack-equipment health.
The Intelligent Rack Transfer Switch — which uses a patent-pending hybrid design for fast and reliable load transfers from one power source to another — now offers outlet-level metering and power switching. Ideal for cloud computing infrastructures and data center racks filled with one-power-supply devices, the new switch is one of the fastest in the industry — twice as fast as standard automatic transfer switches — and one of the most reliable.
Similar to Raritan's intelligent rack power distribution units, the new transfer switch can monitor power at the outlet-level, as well as the inlet-level, providing more granular energy information useful for capacity planning and managing energy costs. The transfer switch's new secure switching capabilities enable power to a device to be turned on and off remotely – eliminating visits to the data center. For more visibility to the data center rack, many customers use Raritan's DCIM software to analyze and monitor the power information gathered by the transfer switch, as well as the health of the power chain.
"Before Raritan released its first intelligent rack transfer switch model, the choices were limited," says David Wood, director, Power Business at Raritan. According to Wood, automatic transfer switches (ATS) were inexpensive, but suffered from longer transfer times of 8 to 16ms, and often failed as a result of electrical arcing that welded contacts together. And, static transfer switches offered very fast transfers of 4 to 6ms, but were nearly six times more expensive than ATS, drew more energy, and produced excess heat that consumed additional cooling resources.
"Raritan overcame these limitations with a new hybrid system that uses the best of both electromechanical relay and silicon-controlled rectifier technologies to deliver fast performance and better energy efficiency and reliability," adds Wood. "By introducing outlet-level metering and switching capabilities to our transfer switch today we are providing tools to help customers better manage their infrastructure resources and create intelligent data centers."
The new Intelligent Rack Transfer Switch will be unveiled at the Datacenter Dynamics conference in New York:
- Presenter -- David Wood
- When – March 17 at 2:20 pm
- Where -- Solution Stage Presentations in the Exhibit Hall
