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Non-stop business Paul Tyrer outlines and emphasises how important an uninterruptible power supply can be to your company’s IT department. The introduction of scalable data centre physical infrastructure is therefore a key enabling technology for reduced total cost of ownership. By taking a building block approach to UPS protection, modular architecture enables additional power modules and battery cabinets to be deployed as a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ solution for growing IT estates. The system can be scaled back too: virtualisation enables organisations to reduce the number of physical servers it requires to run many of the applications required
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Paul Tyrer is Vice President, UK, Ireland, Nordics & Baltics, APC by Schneider Electric. He joined APC in 1994 and has held various management roles as his career has developed. In 2002 he became Director of Channels & Partners, EMEA to develop business for InfraStruXure, APC’s solution for on-demand data centres. He has served the company as country VP since its purchase in 2007 by Schneider Electric.
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t is difficult to envisage any business that could function effectively without IT in this day and age. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that even when businesses are failing or unprofitable, they continue to invest in information technology. In recent years, this increasing dependency has been fuelled by great leaps forward in technology and a buyers’ market. Today, most would agree that the best place to house new generations of compact and powerful IT servers is in dedicated computer rooms and data centres. Irrespective of whether you choose to build your own facilities, outsource your IT infrastructure or elect to have your IT supplied as a service, a key objective will be to ensure continuity of services. Until recently, IT availability has been pursued at almost any cost, with highly resilient infrastructure designs the order of the day to ensure power and cooling for IT, irrespective of the mains power supply condition. But escalating energy costs, coupled with concerns about the environmental impact of increasing numbers of data centres has stimulated action from the EU in the form of the Code of Practice for Data Centre Efficiency. As a result, the consultants responsible for data centre design and build and the manufacturers that supply the plant to power and cool these facilities have started to give primacy to the need to ensure energy efficiency. This has led to a number of changes to the uninterruptible power supply (UPS), the piece of equipment that protects IT equipment against the loss of the mains supply. In the first instance, designers have sought to more closely size the UPS exactly to the load being protected. Oversizing of the UPS not only has consequences for capital costs, but also drives up operating expenses such as energy and service costs.
for day-to-day activities. Scaling down physical infrastructure at the same time affords the opportunity to maximise potential energy savings and, therefore, cost and environmental impact. At the same time, modularity brings benefits by enabling service parts to be kept on site and by reducing the complexity of maintenance. Mean time to repair (MTTR), together with mean time between failure (MTBF) are the measure of availability. By making important components such as power modules user replaceable, time to repair can be decreased, thereby improving the availability of the power protection plant. A major cause of UPS failures is as a result of service visits, and simplifying maintenance routines plays an important part in reducing this hazard. The data centre sector is in the process of adopting the power usage effectiveness (PUE) metric as a gauge of electrical efficiency. The measure is based on the proportion of facility energy that is used to power the IT equipment hosted in the data centre. Ensuring that electrical infrastructure is scaled according to IT requirements is key to achieving lowered PUE; evidence of a well managed data centre. The introduction of UPS which are both high efficiency and which achieve high levels of efficiency at low IT load conditions can be an aid to improving PUE by increasing the amount of energy available for powering IT. High efficiency UPS can also provide some overhead for growth without the user being penalised through heavy operating costs. UPS vendors are taking a technological approach to solving the problems caused by the proliferation of technology. Current generation UPS provide a range of topologies to ensure availability and while the static UPS remains the staple for modern data centre designs, the benefits of modularity, scalability and serviceability are helping ensure the fitness of the facilities that are at the heart of today’s IT services.
23/09/2010 13:22