Raritan Dominion PX

Here's an innovative solution that remotely manages and monitors the power supply to your datacenter. Other than this there's lot more it has on offer

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

What's the biggest problem you face while managing your datacenter remotely? You can easily share, control, access, and manage your IT equipments till the time they are connected to the power and are alive. But once they are down or the physical power switch is turned off you can do nothing with the device. Or let's say you want to do a cold boot (turning off the power for more than ten seconds while rebooting) of your servers remotely for some reason. In such a case traditionally you need to have a person physically present at the site to do it.

So, here is a device to solve your remote power management problems. It is called the Dominion PX and it's from Raritan. With the help of this device you can remotely turn on or off the power of any equipment connected through this device. All you have to do is to go to its web-based interface and select the port which you want to turn on or off and click using the on/off button in the web-based interface. But that's not all about this product, there's lot more to it. It is essentially a power management device which can be accessed over an IP network. The unit we received had eight outlet ports and looked pretty much like a standard 24 port network switch with 1U thickness. There are devices with more number of outlet ports available.

Other than turning on/off, for the devices connected to this unit you can even see the real time consumption of power in terms of ampere and watts at a port basis or at a device basis. This means you can see consumption of power at each port and the total consumption of power by the unit. Some other things which one can find from the web-based interface are the unit voltage and CPU temperature of the unit.

The other great feature about the product is that it can send both SNMP and eMail alerts in case of any threshold being triggered either at a Unit, Board, or output level. This is a very useful feature with which you can figure out at a near real-time basis, the condition of the power supply for your crucial servers. The configuration and usage of the device is pretty simple. It can either be connected over an RS 232 cable or over the network. Most likely first you have to connect to it using an RS 232 cable to give it an IP address. Once you do that you can access it through the IP over a pretty intuitive web-based interface. The interface at the first screen gives you a list of all the ports with their real-time power consumption. And it also gives you the buttons for on/off/ cycle power for each port at the front page itself.

But one thing we found missing in the product was a reporting functionality which can create reports for historical data as well. So that one can figure out the pattern of power consumption at a given period of time for specific product. The device is at any case capturing the data required for this kind of report but currently don't have a system to store and report this historical data. If in future the device updates its firmware with this feature it will be a great feature for the system admins.

Bottomline: Brilliant product for remotely managing the power of your IT equipment

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