Intelligent rack PDUs to top $500 million by 2014

Intelligent rack power distribution products (rack PDUs) are reportedly forecast to grow at an annual average rate of 18.3% over the next five years partly due to rising data center operating costs.

Source: IMS Research (IHS Inc.)

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Intelligent rack power distribution products (rack PDUs) are forecast to grow at an annual average rate of 18.3% over the next five years partly due to rising data center operating costs according to the latest report by IMS Research (recently acquired by IHS Inc.) titled The World Market for Rack Power Distribution Units – 2012 Edition.

Intelligent rack PDUs are power distribution units that can monitor power consumption within a rack or enclosure in a data center and have some level of connectivity. These are forecast to grow nearly twice as fast as non-intelligent units over the next five years.

According to IMS Research analyst Andrés Gallardo: “Sales of intelligent rack PDUs are growing for two main reasons; the first being efficiency. Efficiency remains as the buzz word in the data center industry. Intelligent PDU products allow the data center manager to monitor and track power consumption and then use the information provided by the unit. It is about understanding your activity in order to reduce operating costs.

“The second reason is management control, or in other words, allocating costs. These units allow the operator to understand who is using the IT equipment and how much of power they consume. The major use-case that comes to mind for management control are colocation facilities, which are not interested in reducing costs per se but rather in properly billing their clients. In a similar fashion, rack PDUs allow companies to assign costs to their departments.”

Gallardo further commented: “The market for intelligent units is still growing, and we have seen several companies successfully enter this market. These products have higher average prices than non-intelligent products and companies are much more interested in developing this market than the almost commoditized basic product line.”

APC by Schneider Electric, Server Technology, and Emerson are the top three vendors of intelligent units with a combined share of 56.5% of total revenues for 2011.