ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE COVER STORY
POWER CONTINUITY FOR DATA CENTRE OPERATIONS
With the frequency of brownouts and power spikes, as well as unscheduled power outages, the risks are increasing year on year. Alan Bacon, chief technical engineer at PowerContinuity explores some options that allow for 24/7 seamless operation
spend tens of thousands on brand new UPS and then never service them. Just like your car, if you buy a brand new car and never service it, something will go wrong. With a data centre, you cannot afford for it not to work. What about testing? Now its understandable that data centres do not want to take unnecessary risks when it comes to their power, as they do not want any disruption. However you need to test your power protection systems. If this has to involve an external loadbank to simulate the load, then so be it. At least you know that when you get a real power cut, the UPS won’t just fall over, leaving you pulling your hair out.
P
owerContinuity Systems specialise in power protection solutions for a wide
range of clients including pharmaceutical, food manufacturing and distribution, financial services and automotive industry clients. Data centres are a considerable proportion of PowerContinuity’s business.
I HAVEN’T GOT ANY SPACE LEFT… CONTAINERISED DATA CENTRES Modular containerised data centre solutions are an increasingly popular method of adding additional data centre space, especially if there is a likelihood of you needing to relocate in the short to medium term. PowerContinuity offers a range of purpose built data centres from just a few racks to over 15 racks per container, with the ability to modularise multiple containers. The smart alternative to a brick-and-mortar data centre is a containerised data centre.
WILL MY UPS SUPPORT MY LOAD?...TEST IT Before testing your UPS, you need to make sure that you maintain them. It’s astounding how many customers will
6 MARCH 2017 | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
HOW CAN I LOWER MY PUE… SMART ECO MODE OR ROTARY UPS According to the Uptime Institute, the typical data centre has a PUE of 2.5. That means that for every 1W of power used for the IT load, 2.5W of electricity is used. More efficient ventilation systems, including the maximal use of free cooling, can have a significant reduction in energy usage. With specific consideration of the power protection systems, the UPS can also make quite an impact on energy efficiency. Older online UPS can have an actual real world efficiency of between 88-92 per cent.
The latest transformerless UPS are
more like 96 per cent efficient. It is, however, possible to achieve as much as 99 per cent efficiency by activating Smart ECO modes (all the most well known UPS brands have this feature). This mode uses cleaver algorithms to decide when to operate in true online mode (which is less efficient) and when to operate in bypass mode. Understandably, not everyone will be happy with a UPS not being in online mode all the time, but the learning ability to select the correct mode, for the quality of the mains power it is seeing, is particularly clever. Ultimately it is a risky decision to make. There is another way to increase
efficiency and that is a rotary UPS. Using flywheels as short-term power protection allow consistent efficiencies of up to 98 per cent, and has the added benefit of not requiring a constant 20°C to operate in, unlike the batteries in traditional UPS. In addition, studies have found the likelihood of a rotary flywheel UPS failing is considerably lower than a static battery UPS. Definitely an added benefit for a data centre manager.
PowerContinuity Systems T: 0845 055 8455
www.powercontinuity.co.uk
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