FEATURE DATA CENTRE MANAGEMENT Necessity is the mother of reinvention
The University of Winchester chooses Eaton to reinvent its IT network
S
ometimes the warning signs of an IT failure only become obvious when there is a serious
problem. It is an IT manager’s worst nightmare when a network failure requires urgent maintenance, especially when the faulty equipment itself is part of a disaster recovery solution. The University of Winchester experienced this when its existing UPS systems failed without warning, the first sign being noticeable fumes coming off the batteries in the UPSs that were housed in student villages across the University and protected the Edge IT infrastructure. The University’s IT team had a seemingly
simple decision to make: find a new provider for its UPS requirements. Crucially, the University wanted to avoid any future scenarios where this could happen again, so it needed its new UPSs to enable it to monitor the condition of the batteries and provide proactive diagnostics. Alongside this, it wanted to take the opportunity to bring in power management software that could be integrated with its existing virtualised environment, run on VMware, so that it could manage the entire estate through a single pane of glass. When it came to choosing a new solution, the
University made a decision to avoid like-for- like product replacements, instead wanting to install superior solutions that would bring additional value and reassurance, notably in management and monitoring of the overall solution. The key challenge facing the network upgrade was that a new UPS in the data centre would have to integrate with legacy equipment, while new solutions needed to be compatible with its virtualised environment, managed by VMware’s vCenter, and enable the University to have better predictability around when maintenance should take place, ideally ensuring this was always done outside of term time. Eaton provided the University with its
Intelligent Power Management (IPM) software to support business continuity across its entire estate. The software enables the University’s IT team to manage its mission critical applications across the network from a virtualisation
dashboard. The user can decide which ones can be left running, which ones to shed load and stop, or to limit the power to certain applications. Virtual machines in the University’s network can be shut down through Eaton’s IPM, with the restarting controlled by vCenter virtualisation management software, meaning both shut down and restarting are performed in a manner that minimises downtime and eliminates the risk of data loss. From a hardware perspective, Eaton installed 50 5PX single phase 3kVA units across the campus, each providing a critical runtime of up to 20 minutes in the event of a power failure, long enough for back-up systems to come online to prevent any data loss, corruption or to ride out short power outages with no loss of functionality. Eaton’s 5PX UPS batteries have a design lifetime of five years, and the way it charges batteries enable them to outlive competitor batteries by 50 per cent. Alongside the 5PX units, Eaton also installed
two 9SX 5000VA UPSs to support higher power applications at the network edge and a 93PM UPS in the University of Winchester’s data centre. The 93PM is a 50kW power module with an internal battery cabinet, which has an incredibly small footprint to achieve space- saving in the data centre. It ensures long-term, reliable and uninterrupted operation of the University’s IT equipment, protecting it from failures and long power outages, and has an LCD touchscreen display that provides essential status information at a glance in graphical and numerical formats. Eaton and the University of Winchester
selected products based on how much additional value the University could derive from them. All the UPSs installed at University of Winchester are new products that have been released to market within the last three years, which ensures that they have the best efficiencies in terms of power and running costs, as well as providing as much useable power as possible. Eaton’s UPS units also feature AMB battery
management technology that enables proactive diagnostics of battery life, giving the University’s IT team up to 60 days’ warning ahead of a battery’s end of useful life, which is enough time to hot swap the battery without switching off any IT equipment. Given its experience, this gave the University of Winchester’s IT team huge peace of mind. The University of Winchester now has an infrastructure solution across its data centre and network that is more resilient, future- proofed and ready to grow with its needs. Since implementing the Intelligent Power Management software, the University has been able to get greater insights into what is happening with its IT suite and at a power level. In fact, it has tracked that the UPS units have kept its IT running on a vast number of occasions, despite over 1,500 power event. The proactive diagnostics of the ABM technology also enable the University to plan IT maintenance outside of term time, further increasing uptime.
Eaton
www.eaton.com
12 JUNE 2018 | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
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