The Micro Center Framework: enterprise-grade managed IT services, packaged inside silent, 10-inch energy-efficient hardware appliances.
Pre-provisioned zero-trust networks for home labs, and fully-managed office automation utilities for small businesses. No massive server cabinets required.
PortGuard Appliances is our proprietary hardware line: modular 1U frames, PoE utility units, managed switches and on-site sensing modules — designed alongside the installs we run so the rack, the telemetry and the NOC speak the same language. Sold separately at portguard.store.
- Form factor
- Modular 1U · utility sleds
- PoE budget
- PoE+ · dedicated IoT rail
- Telemetry
- On-site ingest → NOC + client portal
- Sold at
- portguard.store
The appliance line
Every module is built to drop into a PortGuard rack and report into the same NOC dashboard your team already watches.
P-04 Modular 1U Frame
The building block of every PortGuard rack. Hot-swappable 1U chassis with modular utility sleds — add PoE, sensing, or uplink without re-racking. Designed to drop into the installs we run.
View at portguard.store →PG-48P-PoE+ Managed Switch
48-port PoE+ managed switch with L2/L3, VLAN segmentation and per-port telemetry. The same switch we meter in the NOC dashboard — you can watch every port from the portal.
View at portguard.store →PoE Utility Unit
Rack-side PoE budget module for utility and IoT density. Pairs with the P-04 frame to power APs, cameras and phones on a dedicated PoE rail without consuming switch ports.
View at portguard.store →1U Sensing Module
On-site telemetry module that feeds the NOC and client portal — channel utilization, client count, latency and heartbeat. The ingest format your field crew wires into the monitoring tab.
View at portguard.store →Rack-Side UPS
Right-sized clean power for the frame and its sleds. Keeps the sensing and PoE rails alive through a branch trip so the NOC never loses a heartbeat mid-incident.
View at portguard.store →Rack-Side Accessories
Cable managers, patch organizers, shelves and bracket kits cut to the P-04 footprint. The small parts that keep a clean build clean — the same hardware our crews dress out on every job.
View at portguard.store →The energy math is the headline
Industry measurement is blunt about it: a small business choosing between a full-size 19-inch rack running standard rack-mount gear and a 10-inch desktop or wall-mount mini rack running single-board computers (SBCs) and PoE modules is choosing between two very different power bills.
Full-size enterprise cabinet
150 – 600 W
Continuous draw, around the clock. Enterprise switches, servers and appliances in a standard 19-inch rack are sized for capacity first — the wattage is simply the cost of running them.
- 1,314 – 5,256 kWh
- Sized for the load
SBC-based 10-inch mini rack
35 – 70 W
Continuous draw, same uptime. Single-board computers and PoE modules in a 10-inch desktop or wall-mount rack deliver the core network services on a fraction of the power.
- 307 – 613 kWh
- Near-ambient
Up to ~8× less energy
At the top of each range, 600 W versus 70 W is roughly an 8.5× difference in continuous draw — the same network jobs, one-eighth the electricity.
Thousands of kWh back
Over a year, the gap between the two racks can reach about 4,600 kWh — enough that many small sites run the mini rack on a modest UPS and never notice it on the bill.
Runs cool, runs quiet
35–70 W means desktop or wall-mount placement without a dedicated closet, forced cooling or the noise of a full cabinet's fan wall.
Key operational differences when you right-size the solution
Idle overhead vs. active efficiency
- Full-size hardware
- Standard 1U/2U rack servers and 24+ port enterprise PoE switches carry heavy internal power penalties just to stay on — cooling fans, management chips and PDUs can burn 100W+ at absolute idle, before a single packet flows.
- 10-inch SBC hardware
- Hyper-efficient ARM single-board computers (like the Raspberry Pi 5) idle at just 3–4 W headless, and compact 10-inch switches lose only 5–15 W to internal power conversion.
Thermal and environmental load
- Full-size hardware
- A full cabinet can dump 250–500 W of heat into a room continuously, so you have to budget for active climate control — air conditioning or dedicated exhaust fans — or the hardware throttles.
- 10-inch SBC hardware
- Total heat dissipation is so low (~65 W — the equivalent of a single old incandescent light bulb) that passive room ventilation is completely sufficient.
UPS and battery backup scaling
- Full-size hardware
- Because the load is so much higher, battery sizing gets expensive fast — keeping a full rack alive for meaningful time takes enterprise-grade UPS capacity.
- 10-inch SBC hardware
- Drawing roughly 75% less power, an affordable 1500VA UPS that might keep a full enterprise rack alive for ~20 minutes can keep your entire 10-inch SBC network powered for 2 to 3 hours during a blackout.
Figures reflect typical continuous draw for each class of equipment: full-size 19-inch rack-mount networks at 150–600 W and SBC-based 10-inch mini racks at 35–70 W, running 24/7. Actual consumption varies with port counts, PoE budgets and attached devices — we meter every build through the NOC so you can see your own numbers.
Built to be metered
The reason our hardware reads so cleanly in the portal is that we designed it to be watched.
Same chassis, same telemetry
The P-04 frame and 1U sensing module share a footprint and an ingest format — your field crew wires one schema and the NOC sees every metric.
PoE on its own rail
PoE utility units keep APs, cameras and phones on a dedicated rail so a switch reload never drops the devices the NOC is counting.
Clean power, live heartbeat
Right-sized UPS keeps sensing and PoE alive through a branch trip, so the portal never shows a gap mid-incident.
Buy it à la carte or with a build
Appliances are sold separately at portguard.store. Bring them to a PortGuard engagement and we'll rack, wire and meter them for you.
The P-04 frame, PoE utility units and 1U sensing modules are the hardware behind the telemetry shown across this site — available à la carte at portguard.store.