The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) generates a tremendous amount of data that also needs to be stored. Consequently, more and more data centers are needed to fulfill this growing demand for data storage management, increasing energy consumption in the process. At the same time, factories, supermarkets, and other high power consumption applications are also facing pressure to improve energy efficiency for their heavy-load equipment and devices.
Data center operators and application owners need to figure out how to operate numerous servers and power-hungry equipment while optimizing power consumption. Power distribution units (PDUs) are used to control and distribute power to various equipment. Nowadays, intelligent PDUs that feature metering and switching capabilities from remote sites have seen significant market growth due to increasing remote monitoring demands. In fact, a recent industry report1 identifies the increasing demand for data center monitoring solutions as the key driver of PDU market growth. Monitoring PDUs in your application not only helps you optimize your energy usage—by recording daily power consumption for payment calculation and energy management—but also allows you to collect data about the status of your PDUs for device maintenance.
According to Moxa, a leader in connectivity for the IIoT, to reap the benefits of monitoring PDUs, an energy management system (EMS) needs to collect meter data from PDUs so that operators can control, monitor, and optimize the performance of the PDUs. In addition, remote power panels (RPPs) may also be used as an extension of PDUs to increase the power distribution capacity by providing extra circuits. Thus, it’s also important to monitor the circuit breakers and current transformers to ensure that power distribution through different circuits is under control.
Company: MOXA
