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Dealing with the
Data Centre’s Appetite for Power
By Bob Cantrell, Senior Application Engineer, Ericsson Power Modules
revenue, a large amount of power is lost through electrical inefficiency. It can be felt in the heat radiated by servers and power modules, and heard in the buzz of air- conditioning or other cooling systems. More importantly, it is perceived as a financial burden that must be minimized.
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he cost of powering a data centre continues to be a large and growing concern for operators. Although the balance sheet can justify the cost of power consumed to perform useful work that generates
One area where improvements can be achieved is in the supply of power to the data centre’s servers. Today even a single server card can consume over 1kW. In a large data centre, which may contain hundreds of racks, power is supplied to the servers through a network of power modules that begins with a bulk AC/DC supply powered from the AC line provided by the utility company. This usually charges a bank of back-up batteries as part of an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) that may provide a high-voltage DC output, typically 380V, for distributing power to the data centre’s server racks. Alternatively, the UPS may contain an inverter that generates a 240V or 120V AC output for distribution to the racks. Depending on the distribution strategy (AC or high-
Figure 1. Voltage converters of a data-centre distributed power supply.
voltage DC), servers may contain an AC/DC power supply or DC/DC converter to provide a local 48V DC isolated power bus. An additional intermediate bus converter is often used to generate a semi-regulated 12V bus to power point-of-load (POL) DC/DC converters (Figure 1). A single server can contain several POL converters, positioned close to the processors and associated components such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or field-
www.mouser.com January 2017
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