Raritan and Microsoft Collaborate for Microsoft EEC

15.05.2009
Raritan announced that Microsoft's Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) has chosen a suite of Raritan IT infrastructure management solutions for monitoring servers and their energy consumption down to the outlet level.

Located on the main Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, the state-of-the-art data center contains more than US$125 million in hardware and networking equipment, and houses multiple labs for Microsoft's enterprise customers to collaborate with product teams to test and validate Microsoft software solutions in replicas of customer production environments.

The EEC will use Raritan's remote access and control solutions - including Raritan's Dominion KX II KVM-over-IP switches and CommandCenter Secure Gateway - to configure and transform each lab into a scaled representation of a customer's infrastructure. From any Web browser, administrators, as well as customers, will be able to control and configure servers and other IT equipment. The KX II provides secure BIOS-level access with Absolute Mouse Synchronization to servers and supports remote installation of software and diagnostics.

In addition, Raritan's new power management solutions will help customers analyze power consumption and cooling requirements for different server configurations. Servers in the labs will be plugged into Raritan's Dominion PX intelligent rack Power Distribution Units (PDU), which measure power consumption at the outlet level. "With the Dominion PX we'll be monitoring daily the amount of amperage and watts drawn by each piece of equipment in our server racks," said Microsoft EEC Business Development Manager Steve Cole. "We also will be able to look at cooling and humidity statistics at the racks using the Dominion PX environmental sensors."

Raritan's intelligent PX PDUs also will help the EEC find valuable free rack space by using real-time power draw information of equipment instead of relying upon nameplate data.

"The remote management capabilities of the PX, as well as the Dominion KX, are key enablers of zero-touch automated machine deployment," added Cole. "The PX, for example, gives us the ability to remotely power on servers, which is done in sequence to prevent a massive power draw at boot-up. It also helps us in reducing the EEC's energy costs by enabling us to remotely turn off servers that are not in use."