 A critical facility will have many different pieces of equipment that require electricity, and getting power to all of them is no easy feat. That's why there are power distribution units. A power distribution unit, or PDU, is a device with multiple outlets designed to distribute electricity. This kind of thing is especially important to critical facilities like data centers that require reliable, clean power to be spread out among a large number of server racks and HVAC equipment. Using your PDU for power management can improve a facility's efficiency, uptime, and growth. There are two primary types of PDUs that you might see in a critical facility, rack-mount PDUs and cabinet PDUs. Types of rack-mounted PDUs can vary wildly, from simple and cheap rack-mounted power strips to much larger, feature-rich solutions. More advanced rack-mounted solutions offer features such as power-fultering, load-balancing, and remote monitoring via LAN. Advantages to rack-mounted PDUs include being able to monitor power at the inlet and outlet, as well as the PDU branch circuit level, and it allows for support for environment sensors. Sometimes for more power-hungry applications like multiple server cabinets, a larger PDU solution is necessary like a cabinet PDU. Stand-alone cabinet PDUs are self-contained units that include main breakers, individual circuit breakers, and power monitoring panels. The cabinet also provides for grounding via internal bus bars. As you can now tell, power distribution units are vital in mission-critical environments. Feel free to leave a message with how your facility utilizes PDUs in the comments below.