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The energy intensive nature of data centers combined with ever increasing demand for always-on servers pushing “unlimited data” to the growing information consuming masses makes datacenter power and cooling monitoring increasingly crucial for efficient and economical facility management.
I recently spoke with Lisa Mandell, president of Trendpoint Systems Inc., a manufacturer of utility–grade power and cooling monitoring systems. Trendpoint exists on the fine dry edge of datacenter management, with a product line that includes the EnviroCube cooling management device, EnerSure branch circuit power meter and the EnureSure Bus busway power meter. Power metering and cooling management go to the heart of maximizing datacenter efficiency and capacity. “When you’re trying to manage your infrastructure," says Mandell, "you have to get information coming from somewhere, and obviously it comes from meters.”
You can’t manage what you don’t measure and the granularity and flexibility of Trendpoint's innovative product line puts the company in a singular position to bring greater efficiency in the face of an exploding industry, both in new builds and retrofits.
Trendpint’s target market is co-location companies like Raging Wire, government agencies (the FAA is a client) and large commercial accounts such as VMWare and Loral Space Systems, and several others who Mandell says prefer to remain anonymous. “It’s not the kind of B–to–B that lends itself to advertising,” but even so, Mandell is optimistic for future growth and confident that the market for Trendpoint is "wide open.”
"It's hard to imagine any customer having only one type or only one vendor for power distribution, whether it be busway or traditional, and that gives us a huge advantage. We can hook into any DCIM (datacenter information management) system, they don't have to take anything down to install us and we have all the flexibility - within each different power panel - to have any size circuit that they have within one power panel. And we are the only one's that do all of that."
Trendpoint’s product line likely seems a bit esoteric and geeky to the non-IT oriented among us (it took a couple of conversations with Mandell for me to really begin to wrap my head around some of this), but not so for facility managers working to bring costs down, conserve energy and maximize capacity. And the devil is in the details, the nuts and bolts of how to manage for efficiency and capacity in an inherently power-intensive industry that will only continue on its path of rapid growth in an era where "unlimited data" is as ubiquitous and expected-on-demand as the electricity that gives it life.
[Image credit: grover_net, courtesy flickr]
Tom is the founder, editor, and publisher of GlobalWarmingisReal.com and the TDS Environmental Media Network. He has been a contributor for Triple Pundit since 2007. Tom has also written for Slate, Earth911, the Pepsico Foundation, Cleantechnia, Planetsave, and many other sustainability-focused publications. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists