Modularity makes a lot of sense from a cost-efficiency perspective: The more rigid a piece of equipment is in its design, the less versatile it is in its use case. If you make it modular, then you create opportunities to adjust that piece of equipment over time. 

If there's one operational environment that's begging for more modularity, it's the data center. Facility managers are under increasing pressure to make the most of existing resources for cost-saving and efficiency purposes; at the same time, they're expected to facilitate short-term flexibility to accommodate rapidly fluctuating IT needs, and long-term scalability to support business growth. Needless to say, inflexible hardware isn't really conducive to any of these conditions – and that includes power infrastructure. 

Consider the example of a colocation data center. As tenants come and go, as they expand their footprint, and as their expectations shift over time, facility managers and technicians will need to adjust critical infrastructure, such as power distribution units, accordingly.

That, of course, raises the question: What if new business demands render old power strips obsolete? For example, what if your new tenant expects remote switching capabilities? Maybe another tenant wants the exact opposite, and insists upon completely air-gapped power infrastructure. Yet a third might demand environmental monitoring at the PDU level. Problematically, the facility might not have even owned a power strip long enough to have seen ROI on it.

Bear in mind this is only one specific scenario, and there are a million reasons why a data center can lose out from inflexible power hardware. But the point is clear: PDUs need to be upgradeable because your business needs to be upgradeable.

Enter the modular PDU

The modular rack PDU is a natural outgrowth of the modular data center trend, and as far as we can tell, it's here to stay. But why waste time telling you about it when we can just show you. 

Check out the infographic below to see how modular design is reinventing both the economics and the functionality of PDUs.