feature green broadcasting

Feature sponsored by Harris

Power management has never been more important to meet the many and varied requirements of broadcast systems, not only in light of the oft-required need to guarantee uptime, but to reduce costs, both in terms of energy savings and staffing numbers required to maintain an infrastructure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Chris Exelby, general manager of TSL Professional Products Group, reports.

Power management

to the people

S

ystems managers are increasingly faced with meeting guaranteed uptime targets across diversely located equipment facilities. In a cost-conscious and

environmentally sensitive world, they may now also be required to streamline maintenance and support teams, as well as minimise energy consumption.

Clearly, a great many considerations are in play to address these issues. These multiple challenges require a comprehensive solution that can provide both monitoring and control of systems, and effective power management. At TSL, we believe we have provided an elegant and inclusive set of answers.

Our range of power management products can provide both extensive system monitoring and the ability to power down to pre-programmed

Power hungry: broadcast facilities consume significant levels of electrical power.

functional levels to obtain cost and efficiency savings; an example of which is ‘out of hours working’, when perhaps all that needs to be powered in a facility are the play-out servers and satellite uplink. A single operation from the control room can power the facility back to operating readiness when required and, when using TSL’s power management products, introduce the power outlet by outlet and rack by rack in a sequential, delayed or immediate way. This planned approach can save money in energy costs, not just from the equipment, but also in the cost of keeping it cool. Reducing power consumption upon demand is particularly important in countries where supplies are variable and requests to reduce consumption to prevent network overload are commonplace.

Professional product provenance

TSL Professional Products Group was borne of the long experience of TSL’s Systems Integration division. During more than 25 years in the field devising, designing and installing broadcast systems of every description, you learn a thing or two about what works, what doesn’t, and what needs attention. Without meaning to put too fine a point on it,

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in terms of power management there were often requirements for ‘better mousetraps’ that just weren’t available, so we decided to design and build them ourselves.

Attention to power pays off

Power management, in particular, requires special attention, not least for the reasons I’ve already mentioned. It is simply no longer enough to have teams of engineers located in rack rooms around the globe to find and address faults in equipment operation, power outages or reducing energy consumption. While there will of course always be a place for the hands-on approach, the ability to remotely control infrastructures, from anywhere on the planet, provides efficiencies and economies of scale that are vital to modern broadcast operations.

As a result, our award-winning team of in-house experts has developed what is now a leading range of professional power management units that have gained wide acceptance. This family of products now includes units that measure current, power, and power factor (the ratio of actual to apparent power), providing total visibility of the system and the ability to manage the power consumption of the overall system centrally, whether for economic or emergency reasons. Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48