Find your stranded power capacity with Branch Circuit Monitoring!
The Ekko – a newsletter from Data Center Operations Intelligence experts EkkoSense AI for customers, partners and industry colleagues
Every data center operator wants to find and use the power capacity stranded across their estate. But wanting to do that is very different from actually finding the stranded capacity and working out where and how to deploy it.
That’s where the new Branch Circuit Monitoring capability in EkkoSoft Critical comes in. It moves beyond traditional top-down power monitoring to measure power at the individual rack level. This much more granular view gives operators the insight they need for smarter decisions on power provisioning, cooling and resilience.
Branch Circuit Monitoring shows you exactly how much power a site is using and where, which makes it ideal for sites already running close to capacity limits. It tracks power from the UPS through the distribution boards to each PDU. By linking the final distribution panel board to the rack, we can see how much power each rack is using, without ever going into the IT space.
This lets you spot inefficiencies at every stage, makes EkkoSoft Critical’s power monitoring more accurate, and means you can make decisions with certainty. For example, we might uncover 100kW of stranded capacity across a site, show that it’s enough to deploy three more racks, and tell you the best row and rack for that load.
Making Branch Circuit Monitoring simple
We’ve designed Branch Circuit Monitoring to be as easy as possible for operations teams to use. The new panel schedule view shows you what a power specialist would see standing in front of the device. You get a clear picture of your circuits and breaker configurations, and how your power assets connect to your racks.
For power engineers, it offers the views they’re already used to, and it also opens up other EkkoSoft Critical capabilities, such as capacity management optimization. It’s also an important step towards EkkoSoft showing how an entire site or estate fits together from a power perspective.
Existing customers can find out more about this latest functionality here. New to EkkoSense? Contact your EkkoSense area representative for a 1:1 strategy session
- Americas – Steve Lewis Justin Blumling
- EMEA – Adrian Barker James Kirkwood
- AP-J – Patricia Alvina, PMP® MSc Kate Spillane
EkkoSense stands out in 451 Research’s Data Center Operations and Intelligence (DCOI) platforms Buyer Insight report
It was great to see EkkoSense featured in S&P Global Energy’s recent 451 Research Buyer Insight report that looked at product and company considerations for its latest Data Center Operations and Intelligence (DCOI) platforms category.
The report aims to give data center operators, IT leaders and procurement teams an objective framework for evaluating modern DCOI vendors. It sets out how in the DCOI space today’s analytics, intelligence and optimization focussed firms are now ‘addressing emerging gaps around managing energy orchestration and the cross-domain intelligence layer’. 451 Research goes on to establish the requirement for organizations to look beyond traditional DCIM and consider the ‘expanded range of platforms, which increasingly integrate with and manage data center gray space – including air and liquid cooling, and power supplies’.
According to the report: “the strongest DCOI candidates will demonstrate measurable outcomes …. Including faster deployment, improved capacity utilization, reduced cooling or power waste, and lower operational risk”.
New white Paper – The Certainty Principle: know what you have before you build more
Billions of dollars of data center investment are being approved on incomplete data. That isn’t because leaders are careless. It’s because the evidence in front of them is fragmented, trapped or siloed.
The pressure to add capacity has never been greater, whether that means new builds, expansions, retrofits or leases. Yet the business case for each one is often put together from nameplate ratings, design assumptions, periodic audits and systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
When uptime matters and the evidence is incomplete, running conservatively is the right call. But caution has a cost. Uncertainty creates safety margin, and safety margin creates stranded capacity. Stranded capacity then quietly becomes overspend, unnecessary risk, avoidable CO₂ and new builds requested before they’re needed.
What we see across the industry
Across 10+ years, 100,000+ racks, 50+ countries and 100 billion+ data points, EkkoSense consistently finds:
- 5–35% of cooling energy wasted
- 5–30% of rack capacity stranded
Four questions to ask before your next investment
- What usable capacity do we actually have?
- What is preventing us from using more of it?
- What would it cost, and how long would it take, to remove those constraints?
- How does that compare with building more?
If you’re already using EkkoSense, much of the evidence you need is in your platform today. If you’re not, it’s likely sitting across your BMS, DCIM and monitoring systems, waiting to be brought together. Either way, the new white paper shows how to turn that evidence into a clear case for your finance and leadership teams. Get it right, and the financially responsible decision and the sustainable decision become one and the same.
In quantum physics, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a law of nature. In data centers, uncertainty is simply a gap in the evidence. EkkoSense closes that gap. That is the Certainty Principle.
Read the white paper here
Keep updating your models!
EkkoSense Principal Engineer Kat Burdett, who joined us earlier this year, recently presented at the University of Manchester’s Women in STEM event. The event was hosted by the University’s School of Engineering. It gave students the chance to hear about different STEM career journeys and to explore the many paths available within engineering.
Kat shared her own STEM journey. Her early interest in aerospace engineering led her to thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, and eventually to her current role as a Principal Engineer specializing in data center environments. Kat’s view? Changing direction is what good engineers do!
Kat also talked about optimization. Whether you’re optimizing a career or an engineering system, she explained, you need to weigh both the function that matters and what it costs in resources. That’s why it’s important to keep updating the model so you keep asking the key questions: Are we measuring the right thing? What have we failed to measure? Is the system operating sustainably? These questions apply just as much to STEM career development as they do to data center optimization.
Telecommunications – unlock hidden capacity and operational savings with EkkoSense DCOI
Our new telecommunications page shows how Data Center Operations Intelligence (DCOI) gives telco operators optimized site performance and the savings they need.
EkkoSoft Critical, works alongside your existing DCIM and BMS. It reads rack inlet temperatures, airflow and power from site incomers to the rack. It then flags power, cooling and capacity risks your control tools have missed, before they become outages.
One platform covers your whole estate, from remote edge sites to switch sites, POPs and the core data center. Operators typically see:
- stranded compute capacity released
- cooling energy use down 10–15%
- audit-grade ESG figures measured at the rack, not estimated
For a 1:1 strategy session, contact our telco expert James Kirkwood.
View the previous edition of The Ekko here and thank you as ever to our fantastic customers who are helping to drive our product roadmap and deliver the leading solutions in solving the very real problems of the industry as it rapidly scales.
Further reading? Read this blog How to find stranded capacity in data centers
