It took some time before CIOs and enterprise IT managers made racks and enclosure an important part of their agenda. But once they did, there was no turning back. In the last financial year, there was tremendous interest in racks and enclosure, which has grown more sophisticated with time. This was also reflected in the 33% growth in the segment. The primarily consideration for this, however, is the increased awareness to save energy, space, and uptime in enterprises.

Changing Views
With enterprise across all verticals adopting a green agenda, and an objective to reduce the cost of data center operations through planning and modeling, the segment was set to witness a year of good growth. The industry also moved toward sensitive and precise monitoring of in-rack parameters and toward taking charge of in-band or even out-of-band situations from remote consoles.

Data centers continued to be the biggest drivers of the racks and enclosures industry in India. RBI guidelines for the BFSI sector on implanting Basel 2 also helped fuel the growth in this segment. The importance of this segment can be gauged from the fact that HP imports all the racks that are bundled with its products.

Mostly perceived as a generic product in a data center, it is only now that there is an increased awareness about racks, as data center managers have started to deploy the right set of racks and enclosure. Awareness programs by leading vendors have been a great success in spreading this awareness.

This segment also got a boost thanks to a tendency to centrally plan, manage and monitor data center space, and equipment and environment changes in response to the dynamic changes in the IT network. There is a clear need for intelligent tools and advisory services that support full data center visualization, physical infrastructure capacity management, availability of space and cooling and above all, control power supply and redundancy analysis.

End-users started to look at enclosure manufactures as total solutions providers, providing intelligent enclosures with wide range of accessories such as remote monitoring of temperature, humidity, smoke, vibration and access. Some innovations in the segment were metered power system module along with the ability of remotely switching off and on the server over IP; power distribution module; digitally coded and smart-card swipe lock systems; and energy efficient cooling system, rather than bare steel sheet powder enclosures.

The challenges data centers face include high heat loads generated due to blade servers, cooling systems and components for reliable climate control, power to help reduce installation and operating costs while increasing reliability, monitoring, and security to ensure complete protection apart from the need for enclosures with high load bearing needed in most installations.

Changing Trends
Racks, which used be treated as technical furniture inside a data center, have come a long way. Racks were traditionally made of galvanized iron (G1 racks), which made them very heavy, and this became a major concern because servers and other components housed inside the racks were heavy as well.

The racks and enclosures industry is seeing a shift from GI-based to aluminum-based, giving more room for heavier components to be kept inside. GI racks typically weighed around 150 kg, so with lighter aluminum racks, enterprises can plan accordingly and work more conveniently. These racks also help dissipate heat more efficiently.

Another noticeable trend was the high degree of perforation in racks because higher perforation leads to better heat dissipation. This also became an important building block for the green data center.

Source: APC

The depth of the rack is also on the rise. What used to be 600x800 or 800x800 is now 800x1000. In fact, APC claims to offer a depth of 1,200 mm. Servers need depth as their width and height are almost frozen in order to add more compute power. This was also in keeping with the future requirements of data centers.

The density of racks also showed an increase. From the earlier 100 watt/sq ft (3 KVA/rack), the trend now is toward 200 watt/sq ft (6KVA/rack). This has, according to vendors, addressed three challenges including good airflow, power distribution, and cable management.

There has also been an increased cooperation between rack manufacturers and structured cabling vendors to ensure that a proper cable management system is put in place before the racks are ordered, to allow for some kind of customization.

Cabling being a one-time investment and with many problems associated with dismantling it in case of expansion, integrators work together with cabling vendors to ensure that sufficient planning is done before the process of implementation takes place.

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