Those of you who are seasoned data centre users will recognise these units as PDUs (power distribution units in case you were wondering). So what, you're thinking, there's nothing special about those.

Well, in a sense you're right, they are common occurances in a data centre - even though these ones are brand new and shiny. However, it's what's inside that is really cool.

In NEXTDC data centres we monitor the power consumption from each individual rack. That means that inside these particular PDUs there is a circut breaker for each rack monitoring the power output so we can instantly identify if anything is wrong.

This power consumption information is also provided to our customers through our proprietary ONEDC application so that they can check in anytime they like and see instantly how much power each of their racks is consuming. We call this "giving the power to the people". It's part of our data centre revolution.

On one side of the data hall the PDUs look like the image above, on the other side they look like the image below (which was taken during the cable installation). Why two different colours?

Because there are two separate power supplies in each data hall (A and B) and we use a different colour to identify the PDUs for the A or B power supply. Pretty neat huh?