Mission Critical Power June 2019

missioncriticalpower.uk

ISSUE 22: June 2019

08

Eq uinix reports that its interconnection revenues are growing faster than its data centre revenues. What does this mean for the data centre sector and innovation at the edge?

20

The Wellcome Sanger Institute’s 4MW data centre is supporting lifesaving genome research, making resilience a critical imperative

36

A new battery technology has been derived from the pigment that inspired Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’.

Could it rival the dominant chemistries on the market?

3

IN THIS ISSUE

14 Going green?

With climate change high on the agenda, Ian Bitterlin dicusses the use of renewables and questions what it means to be ‘green’

8

16

Digital transformation

Boost for Ireland

Interconnection revenues are growing faster than data centre revenues, for Equinix. So, what is behind this growth?

A new report highlights major inward investment in Ireland’s data centre infrastructure

20 Powering discovery Data centre resilience is critical to safeguarding precious genome sequencing data at the Wellcome Sanger Institute

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missioncriticalpower.uk

ISSUE 22: June 2019

08

Eq uinix reports that its interconnection revenues are growing faster than its data centre revenues. What does this mean for the data centre sector and innovation at the edge?

20

The Wellcome Sanger Institute’s 4MW data centre is supporting lifesaving genome research, making resilience a critical imperative

36

A new battery technology has been derived from the pigment that inspired Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’.

Could it rival the dominant chemistries on the market?

Deeper insight Why deep component visibility, intelligent grid connection and elastic critical infrastructure are key

40

12

Sustainable energy How can high energy users reduce their environmental impact, improve efficiency and generate additional revenue?

Front cover Riello and RWE’s partnership is powering an energy revolution

Comment

4

Edge Data Centres

19

Energy Management

34

News

6

Power Distribution

24

Battery Storage

36

Data Centre Trends

8

UPS

28

Products

49

Thermal Optimisation

32

Q&A

50

Viewpoint

14

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June 2019 MCP

4

COMMENT

Towards carbon zero...

The Committee on Climate Change has published a report calling for a new emissions target for the UK: net-zero greenhouse gases by 2050. With calls for industry to be “largely decarbonised”, major energy users must do everything in their power to get to grips with energy efficiency and sustainability measures.

the ICT load has been exponentially growing, fuelling data centre growth.” There are even greater challenges ahead, however; the move to 5G is predicted to increase total network energy consumption by 150170% by 2026, with the largest increases in macro, node and network data centre areas (see p18).

In the data centre sector, a number of high-profile colocation providers have set ambitious targets to move to 100% renewable energy. Interxion, for example, is using 100% renewable energy, mostly wind energy, throughout all three of its data centres in Dublin, and its latest addition in the capital, DUB3, will provide approximately 2,300 sq m of equipped space and 5MW of customer power – using only renewable energy.

Equinix also has a long-term goal of using 100% clean and renewable energy across its global platform. In 2018, Equinix achieved 77% renewable energy, and this year the company expects this figure to exceed 90%.

At the Energyst Event (www.theenergystevent.com) Engie and Ikigai Capital emphasised that businesses cannot wait for government mandates if they want to remain profitable. Moreover, they believe that zero carbon is not only possible technically, but also financially. In fact, there are already significant efforts under way to tackle challenges in the data centre sector. The European Union’s research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020, has funded the Boden Type Data Centre project in Sweden, which aims to evaluate the most energy efficient approaches to data centre design. The lessons learned will benefit everyone.

Recently, Microsoft’s president Brad Smith announced plans to virtually double its internal carbon fee to $15 per metric tonne on all carbon emissions, to hold its business divisions financially responsible for reducing their carbon emissions. This is in addition to a target of moving to 100% renewable energy for its data centres, with a goal to surpass the 70% target by 2023.

While data centres are coming under fire for their high energy consumption, it is important to remember that they are also a force for good. The story of the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s data centre, which is powering the genome sequencing project, demonstrates just how important data centres are in facilitating some of the most important scientific discoveries for the betterment of mankind, helping to save lives.

The institute’s data centre manager, Simon Binley, was recently awarded the accolade of ‘Data centre manager of the year’ at the DCS Awards, in recognition of his work in maximising the data centre’s efficiency and resilience. You can read more about the project in this issue (p20-22).

In this issue (p14), Ian Bitterlin comments: “The biggest problem we have had from the early days of data centres is that

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MCP June 2019

Sales director Steve Swaine steve@energystmedia.com t: 020 3714 4451 m: 07818 574300

Louise Frampton, editor

Energyst Media Ltd, PO BOX 420, Reigate, Surrey RH2 2DU Registered in England & Wales – 8667229 Registered at Stationers Hall – ISSN 0964 8321 Printed by Warners (Midlands) plc

Commercial manager Daniel Coyne T: 02037517863 M: 07557109476 E: daniel@energystmedia.com

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6

NEWS & COMMENT

CBRE partners Uptime Institute on data centre risk assessment Global data centre authority Uptime Institute and CBRE Data Centre Solutions, an integrated data centre operations service provider, have announced a strategic partnership to enable CBRE to offer an operationsfocused data centre risk assessment solution as part of its ‘Critical Environment Risk Management’ (CERM) portfolio.

“Our data centre customers look to CBRE to proactively offer the means to reduce their risks associated with delivering business services,” said Mike Doolan, chief reliability officer, CBRE Data Centre Solutions.

“In response, we sought out the industry’s most respected provider of data centre risk assessment services to become an integral part of our risk management solution. By adding Uptime Institute’s Management & Operations Stamp of Approval assessment service to our own operational offerings, we can make available unparalleled risk mitigation services to our customers.”

Key indicators considered during the Uptime Institute assessment include the review of operational processes in place, expected behaviours and

Stamp of approval: CBRE customers can have their data centre operations independently assessed the risk mitigation methods that need to be in place to ensure efficient and effective data centre operations.

CBRE customers who subscribe to their CERM services will be given the option of having their data centre operations independently assessed by Uptime Institute experts at both the site and portfolio level to confirm that the data centres meet Uptime Institute’s demanding and

market-tested operational and sustainable standards.

Uptime Institute CEO and chairman Martin McCarthy said: “Reducing the risks associated with providing essential business services requires both technical and operational prowess.

“Uptime Institute’s globally adopted M&O Stamp of Approval provides the industry’s only independent validation of operational practices, supporting cost

effectiveness, risk management, sustainability and operational efficiency goals. Our new partnership with CBRE extends their CERM programme further to include a deeper focus on operational efficiency and risk assessment, utilising Uptime Institute’s proven M&O Stamp of Approval protocol to identify and mitigate risk to ensure CBRE clients’ business runs smoothly.”

CBRE is offering an immediate opportunity to both new and existing customers to formally assess their operational plans by engaging with Uptime Institute to complete their independent assessment. CBRE clients who are able to demonstrate superior management and operations processes will be awarded Uptime Institute’s ‘Management & Operations Stamp of Approval’.

As part of this programme, CBRE customers will enjoy a preferential rate for the M&O Stamp of Approval assessment.

In addition, CBRE customers will have the ability to amortise the costs of the assessment over the duration of the award period, therefore giving clients the option to budget for the risk assessment as an ongoing operational expense.

Government advised to set zero carbon target The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has advised government to set a more stringent decarbonisation target. Its latest report urges a net zero greenhouse gas emissions target by 2050, up from its previous recommendation of 80%.

The CCC called for policymakers to act far more urgently in setting out the required frameworks, with a major ramp up of investment across heat, industry and transport required.

MCP June 2019

Current policy would not even hit the previous target, the CCC warned.

It reiterated calls for progress on hydrogen for heat, carbon capture and storage for the government to bring forward the 2040 ban on sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles.

The committee thinks its recommended tougher target can be delivered for about the same cost as the 80% target. The authors claim that, if replicated across the

world, the target has a greater than 50% chance of limiting the temperature increase to 1.5°C. The report concludes: “A new UK target for net-zero GHGs by 2050, backed by a robust set of plans to achieve it within the UK’s strong and widely respected legislative framework, would send a strong international signal at a critical time.”

The government has said it will study the findings.

missioncriticalpower.uk

7

Energy storage veterans join Natron Natron Energy, a provider of battery products using Prussian blue electrode chemistry, has announced the appointment of two well-established energy storage veterans, Dr Robert Rogan and Jack Pouchet. Rogan will serve as chief business officer, and Pouchet will lead Natron’s sales team as vice president of sales.

Colin Wessells, CEO of Natron Energy, commented: “We are excited to bring Robert and Jack to the Natron team as their vast technical and industry expertise will be invaluable as we transform industrial and grid energy storage by providing customers with lower cost, longer lasting, more efficient and safer batteries.”

Rogan joins Natron Energy from SunPower, where he managed strategy,

business development and marketing groups. Additionally, Rogan built an energy storage business at SunPower into a market leader in 2.5 years. Previously, he led eSolar’s efforts to close 429MW of Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) worth $2.5bn.

Pouchet joins Natron from Vertiv, where he served as vice president of business development. Prior to Vertiv, he spent 15 years with Emerson Network Power as director of energy initiatives and vice president of market development. In these roles, he worked with customers, industry, academia, government and international agencies on energy efficiency and responsibility issues while defining new products and platforms.

Industry boost for scholarship fund to tackle digital skills gap EkkoSense, a leading M&E capacity planning, monitoring and simulation specialist for critical live environments, has become a supporter of the Infrastructure Masons (IM) Scholarship Fund, set up to help bridge the talent gap in the digital infrastructure sector.

The iM Scholorship fund supports educational programmes, funds scholarships and seeks to help to define the digital infrastructure job ladder to support the evolving needs of industry sector businesses.

Simon Allen, executive director of the Infrastructure Masons, said: “One of the biggest challenges facing the fast-growing digital infrastructure sector is the shortage of talent entering our industry. IM’s mission is to ‘Unite the Builders of the Digital Age’ by creating the platform for our members to connect, grow and give back.

"One of our key current initiatives is ‘Bridging the Talent Gap’, where Infrastructure Masons is focussed on funding missioncriticalpower.uk

The Infrastructure Masons's scholarship fund is helping to bridge the digital infrastructure talent gap scholarships for approved degrees and certificates. We’re delighted that EkkoSense is supporting iM and, specifically, our Education Challenge fund, with projects including the creation and support of a community of digital infrastructure educators, alignment of mentoring and internship programmes, as well as the funding of scholarships.”

EkkoSense CEO Dean Boyle added: “As an organisation we’re focussed on building out our business providing

powerful, software-driven thermal optimisation solutions for critical live environments – however we’re also aware that we’re part of a broader digital infrastructure community, so we’re proud to be supporting the Infrastructure Masons activities via The Influence Board.

“At EkkoSense, we’re already engaged with local universities supporting PhD and research programmes and one of our senior engineers won last year’s DCS Individual of the Year Award.”

News in brief Centrica slashes energy use for Poole hospital Centrica has helped Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust dramatically reduce its energy usage. The £6.7 million project included a new combined heat and power (CHP) unit, new standby generator and controls, steam generators and boilers, an upgraded air handling unit and improved lighting both internally and externally. Some of the results were immediate, with overall energy demand at the hospital falling by an impressive 29%. The project is expected to deliver annual cost savings of £420,000, and a carbon reduction of 23%.

Equinix opens new London data centre Equinix has officially opened its new International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre at its London Slough campus. The new £90m high performance data centre – named LD7 – forms part of a wider £295m investment from Equinix into the UK’s digital infrastructure throughout 2018/19.

CBRE and CNet partner on training CBRE Data Centre Solutions, an integrated data centre operations service provider, has announced its commitment to further enhance the certification credentials of its technical workforce globally.

Through a strategic alliance with technical education company CNet Training, the two firms will deliver a comprehensive training and development programme that requires each data centre technician to achieve the Certified Data Centre Technician Professional (CDCTP) certification.

June 2019 MCP

8

DATA CENTRE TRENDS

Digital transformation at the edge: why connectivity is key Equinix reports that its interconnection revenues are growing faster than its data centre revenues. As applications become increasingly distributed, residing not only in on-premises data centres but also in public clouds, organisations are finding that the parameters of what constitutes a data centre network must be redefined. Louise Frampton reports

T

he world is digitising at a rapid pace as major macro, technology and regulatory trends are mandating a business shift to the digital edge. IDC predicts that by 2021, at least 50% of global GDP will be digitised, with growth in every industry driven by digitally enhanced offerings, operations and relationships.

To capture digital value, companies will need to support real-time interactions by more strategically interconnecting the work flows across people, locations, clouds and data. The most recent Global Interconnection Index from Equinix predicts MCP June 2019

interconnection bandwidth will grow to 8,200-plus terabits by 2021, a dramatic increase on the previous year’s projection.

This represents a significant five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48%, almost double the expected 26% CAGR of global IP traffic.

Michael Winterson, vice president business development – EMEA, and managing director Equinix Services, comments: “Revenue from interconnections is actually growing faster than our data centre revenue.

“This is a signal to us that enterprises are seriously deploying new network connections – either between

themselves or to service providers – to be able to deploy new digital transformation technologies. This may be artificial intelligence, big data solutions and IOT, or truly branching out to totally online applications,” Winterson continues.

“For example, we have a 150-year-old tyre manufacturer that has an entire R&D team spinning off 100% pure appbased solutions to integrate into a vehicle’s ‘infotainment’ system – it has nothing to do with their 150-year-old business. It is a whole new game for them. Is it changing their revenue streams? Not yet.

Is it a core function of their

board of directors’ vision for the future? Absolutely!”

Executing a digital transformation strategy is a major undertaking, according to Winterson. The digital transformation of a business requires “going back to basics”, making specific decisions around: • Where is their data centre?

• Where is their data collected?

• How can they connect between traditional data centres and the cloud?

• Where are their users?

“From this, they will have to fundamentally recreate their business. These digital transformation projects missioncriticalpower.uk

9 than 50% growth in direct interconnection over the next 4-5 years. They are rebuilding the foundations of their infrastructure, to be able to take advantage of AI and big data sets,” Winterson comments.

He adds that fears around globalisation, political alignment, Brexit and trade wars are all overshadowed by the secular trend of digital transformation of businesses.

“Businesses are adopting technology not just to optimise costs or create new business models but also as a means of protecting themselves against what appears to be a slightly more chaotic world.

A business that has a digital engine can be much more flexible than one that doesn’t.

The adoption rates shown in our Interconnection Index are important signals to us that digital transformation is advancing regardless of geopolitics,” he comments.

According to Winterson, Brexit has had no effect on the rate of interconnections in the

He adds that the UK still represents 35% of all growth in interconnection in the entire EMEA region and this will continue to increase: “The world will continue to need the services that are available in London. The UK is one of the world’s leading finance trading hubs and is the world’s leading foreign exchange hub.

It is also a major hub for legal, consultancy and accounting services.”

Winterson says that 5G will be a core “Lego brick” in the digital transformation of business. “Data aggregation and data analytics (big data), and the vast amount of cloud-based solutions, will be ‘stitched’ together through interconnectivity. Software defined networks and 5G will be important components of this.

“We expect 5G to be quickly deployed across the UK market – the country already has excellent 4G coverage, which can be easily upgraded to 5G. Equinix has good relationships with all four of the major

happening at an enterprise level. You will quickly see the emergence of smart factories, smart hospitals and smart campuses – we expect to see a large increase in the amount of data that will be collected and brought back to the core network. This is why interconnection is growing so quickly,” comments Winterson.

He adds that the ultimate vision is for systems that enable smart cities or smart supply chains. For this to happen, hundreds of companies will need to adopt digital transformation and the 5G network will need to “enable interoperability between many companies in an overarching system”, says Winterson, adding that this is “still years away”.

However, he adds that a global interconnection platform designed for digital business can accelerate digital transformation efforts by helping enterprises and providers “reach everywhere, interconnect everyone and integrate everything”.

Businesses are adopting technology not just to optimise costs or create new business models, but also as a means of protecting themselves against what appears to be a slightly more chaotic world. A business that has a digital engine can be much more flexible than one that doesn’t will span many years,” says Winterson. He adds that big data, AI, cloud and 5G will remain core components of digital transformation in the near future.

“There isn’t going to be a new ground swell of technology that is going to stop this juggernaut of transformation. It will be more of the same, but we are going to start seeing cooler and cooler applications,” he comments.

Equinix is seeing growth in areas such as: the financial services sector, the trading community and manufacturing.

“All of these industries are expected to show greater missioncriticalpower.uk

UK. In fact, the growth rate in the UK is expected to grow at 52% over the next five years.

(This exceeds the predicted growth for the US, which is expected to be around 45%.)

“Business leaders and technology companies still see the UK as a core growth market for interconnection.

The reasons are simple.

There is already a wellestablished global network that connects throughout the UK. We are seeing people continue to invest in this. We are partnering with a cable company that is now building the fastest route between London and Paris,” Winterson says.

operators – they all have core network nodes in our data centres, so we know their 5G plans are moving forward very quickly.

“However, what you won’t see happening rapidly, is 5G creating the onset of a 100% virtual reality world, such as connected vehicles and remote surgeries. All of these concepts will still require significant upgrades to the fibre backbone and fibre build-out projects.”

Winterson asserts that it is this ‘second wave’ that will see the delivery of 100x bandwidths and ultra-low latency.

“In two to three years’ time, you will see the real innovation

“Equinix collects ecosystems,” comments EMEA president Eugene Bergen Henegouwen. “When you have connectivity density, it never goes away. The internet is connecting at Equinix – 90% of internet traffic goes through one or more of our International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres.”

This gives Equinix a unique insight into digital transformation across a variety of industries. As the early adopters of interconnection, the telecommunications industry is expected to grow at a 36% CAGR as it evolves its platforms to enable digital business, addressing cybersecurity and » June 2019 MCP

10

DATA CENTRE TRENDS

providing new interconnected services.

As a purveyor of digital capabilities, the cloud and IT services industry is expected to remain a leading consumer of interconnection bandwidth, and is predicted to grow at a 37% CAGR, as these businesses continue to extend the global reach of their platforms, while enabling secure data exchange in a compliant manner with their customers.

As one of the most physically distributed industries, manufacturing is experiencing a renaissance period as digital business unlocks new revenue streams while creating new efficiencies. This is expected to drive interconnection bandwidth usage to grow at a 56% CAGR, as the industry shifts to movement of information and local production of goods.

A perfect digital storm is also brewing for the banking and insurance industry with the convergence of fintech, cybersecurity, data compliance and new competitive ecosystems. This is driving a predicted 65% CAGR, as digital transformation of the industry unfolds.

“We are observing many revolutions taking place across the whole spectrum of industries. One example is the insurance industry. In the past, their business was to pay out claims. They would hedge their risk. There are companies that now collect massive amounts of data and sell this to the insurance industry,” Henegouwen comments.

“By analysing the data, the insurance industry is not just able to pay claims but help avoid calamity – in the case of flooding, for example, populations downstream of a river can be alerted of rising water levels upstream.

Interconnectivity is enabling lots of these silent revolutions.”

To support this growth, Equinix is expanding its interconnectivity provision, enabling customers to securely scale their digital business.

“At first, we had the Cross MCP June 2019

Equinix has now evolved into a global platform connecting businesses at the digital edge

We have connected all the IBX data centres inside a metro. We will have 12 data centres in London – all of them are interconnected Connect – a point-to-point cable link between two customers in the same IBX data centre. It doesn’t get more secure than this – it connects company A with company B, with no one in between,” Henegouwen explains.

“Most recently, we have connected all the IBX data centres inside a metro. We will have 12 data centres in London – all of them are interconnected. This means that two enterprises that wish to connect do not have to be in the same IBX data centre.

They still have a 100% secure connection. We have now taken this even further by connecting all the metros together.”

With the completion of

the most recent phase of the Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) Fabric build-out, Platform Equinix has now evolved into a global platform connecting businesses at the digital edge.

The SDN-enabled interconnection service allows customers to establish on-demand network connections between the Americas, Europe and AsiaPacific.

Ultimately, interconnection – direct and private traffic exchange between businesses – is becoming core to operations for companies in today’s digital world. This ‘ecosystem’ is facilitating digital innovation across industries.

Brad Casemore, vice

president, data centre networking, IDC, concludes: “The imperative of digital transformation is driving enterprises to adopt multicloud strategies, which entail complex management of multi-cloud environments.

Indeed, as their applications become increasingly distributed, residing not only in on-premises data centres but also in public clouds, these organisations are finding that the parameters of what constitutes a data centre network must be redefined.

In this context, IDC finds that interconnection architectures at the digital edge are becoming integral elements of a comprehensive network for the cloud era.” l

Equinix plans expansion Equinix has announced that it will open 12 new International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres and expand 23 existing IBX data centres in 2019, as part of an almost $2bn expansion programme for the year. The substantial investment includes new and expanded sites across Europe. Growth markets include London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Helsinki, Madrid, Paris, Sofia, Stockholm, Warsaw and Zurich. By providing new capacity in 2019, Equinix will continue to extend Platform Equinix, enabling companies to deploy their IT infrastructure and services at the digital edge in more than 50 metros across the globe.

missioncriticalpower.uk

DATA CENTRE INFRASTRUCTURE

11

Uptime Institute announces outage severity rating The number of outages has steadily climbed in recent years, prompting the Uptime Institute to develop a standardised method of articulating the severity of such incidents, with the aim of better understanding key trends

T

he Uptime Institute has announced its new Outage Severity Rating (OSR) to help the digital infrastructure and data centre community better understand and articulate service outages in the context of how each incident affects the business.

For the past three years, Uptime Institute’s Intelligence group has been studying publicly reported outages to understand the causes and impacts of unplanned downtime. During the threeyear time period, the number of public outages has steadily climbed, with 27 outages in 2016, 57 outages in 2017 and 78 outages in 2018.

This rise in outages is proportional to the complexity of typical infrastructures, where computing capacity and its associated data is delivered by a combination of in-house data centre sites, colocation facilities and the cloud, all connected by high capacity networks.

Consequently, IT system and network problems have now surpassed mission critical and facilities issues as the leading causes of publicly recorded outages, compared with power, which was the biggest cause in previous years.

Uptime Institute executive director of research Andy Lawrence says: “Public awareness of outages is becoming more pronounced as the number and impact of outages increases. In most cases, we find it difficult to understand the true nature and magnitude of the outage since most practitioners still characterise the severity of an outage based on the amount of

missioncriticalpower.uk

Uptime Institute’s OSR eliminates the equipment-centric view of outages affected physical infrastructure equipment.

“The OSR was developed to allow the data centre industry’s infrastructure practitioners to view outages from the top down, at the IT service delivery level, and then communicate with one another in an informed and normalised business impact fashion. The OSR eliminates the equipment-centric view of outages, and instead focuses on the ability for the hybrid digital infrastructure to support the required IT business services being delivered by the infrastructure.”

Historically an ‘outage’ was considered as a binary state of service delivery; entire data centres were described as online or offline. Consequently, Uptime Institute has been advising companies that they need to pay more attention

to business service resiliency, understanding how the hybrid system is designed, what the interdependencies are, and then plan accordingly.

The use of OSR will allow IT business managers to better understand their own outage trends and where to focus their investments to reduce business continuity vulnerabilities and other risks over time.

The Outages Severity Rating (OSR) is categorised as follows: • Negligible – This is a minor outage, recorded and reported but with little or no obvious impact on business services, and no service disruptions.

• Minimal – This is an outage where some number of IT business services are disrupted or degraded but with minimal effect on users/customers/reputation.

• Significant – This is an outage with observable customer/user services disruptions, mainly of limited scope, duration or effect.

Minimal or no financial effect. Some reputational or compliance impact(s) possible.

• Serious – This is a major outage, with disruption of service and/or operations.

Ramifications include some financial losses, compliance breaches, damage to reputation and possible safety concerns.

• Severe – This is a mission critical outage, with major, damaging disruption of services and/or operations, with ramifications including large financial losses, possible safety issues, compliance breaches, customer losses and reputational damage. l

June 2019 MCP

Sponsored Cover Story

Partnership powering an energy revolution Riello UPS General Manager Leo Craig and RWE Product Manager Dario Hernandez outline how a new collaboration could soon help mission-critical sites turn their uninterruptible power supplies into ‘virtual power plants’ capable of demand-side response

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here’s no question that the UK’s energy mix is going through a massive transition towards a low or even zero-carbon future. Only last month, the country went more than entire week without burning coal to generate electricity, the longest period since the Industrial Revolution.

But as we become more and more reliant on renewables such as wind and solar to keep the lights on, National Grid faces a tough task.

Despite their undoubted environmental benefits, these low-carbon sources are much more unpredictable than coal or nuclear, so it’s far harder to balance supply with demand to ensure a stable grid frequency.

Increasingly, National Grid is turning to more flexible supply and demand driven

by smart energy grids, harnessing the benefits from new technologies such as onsite generation and battery storage.

This trend is undoubtedly assisted by the growing commercial viability of largescale premium lithium-ion batteries, where prices have dropped 76% since 2012 and are likely to continue to fall.

Up to now, mission-critical sites such as data centres have been reluctant to participate in this energy revolution.

Perhaps understandably, there’s been a certain reluctance to do anything that could risk the continuity of their electricity supply. The view seems to be that the benefit of efficiency savings simply isn’t worth the worry about potential downtime.

We believe the partnership between Riello UPS and RWE will change those

perceptions. By encouraging IT managers and data centre operators to rethink the role of their uninterruptible power supplies, we can provide a UPS system that acts as a ‘virtual power plant’, capable of demand-side response (DSR) without compromising on resilience.

What we offer delivers lower upfront and operating costs alongside enhanced – rather than diminished – system reliability, a genuine win-win.

To turn such a concept into reality, we required a partner with deep knowledge and experience in the energy market.

That’s where RWE comes in. It is the largest electricity producer in Germany, and through its RWE Supply & Trading division is also one of the biggest energy traders in Europe.

The Riello UPS-RWE solution ur virtual power plant’ idea is based on an adapted Riello UPS uninterruptible power supply e uipped with a special rectifier that allows electricity to flow both from and to the grid. longside this modern, energy efficient and high-performing system is either premium lead-acid or lithium-ion battery bloc s with sophisticated monitoring and communications software that allows interaction with the grid in real-time ne of the ma or drawbac s in a traditional using lead-acid batteries is how difficult it is to monitor the batteries are you sure they’ll wor when you really need them to he mandatory monitoring necessary with the premium batteries in our solution actually enhances system reliability, meaning you can be certain the batteries will wor when required.

In our system, the batteries are split into two sections he first part’s one and only role is to provide bac up power in case of emergency. The other section is a commercial’ element where electricity is stored to be used either for grid services such as Frequency Response or alternatively to avoid expensive pea time power charges. f a power failure occurs, any energy left in the commercial’ segment of the battery can be activated to top up the main backup, extending overall backup time.

Riello SmartGrid

Riello UPS and RWE have successfully piloted our first virtual power plant’ since September at a site carrying a secured load at ’s global headquarters in Essen, Germany. This innovative project has been shortlisted in the ata entre for mart ity’ category of the international atacloud lobal wards hile a follow-up plant here in the will go live later this year

Benefits for mission critical sites For data centre operators contemplating getting involved, there are two fundamental benefits irstly, partly covers the cost of the more expensive premium batteries. Not only does this significantly reduce the upfront and operational cost of installing a new UPS system, it also increases reliability compared to conventional UPS installations because of the battery monitoring.

Secondly, RWE also takes on any associated ris with trading on the energy mar et epending on where the project is connected, data centres could potentially save up to £6,000 per MW per year in standard grid operating costs. is provided by the system by ta ing advantage of ational rid’s incentive to balance the electricity networ through a scheme called dynamic Firm Frequency Response (FFR). This rewards energy users who can uic ly reduce consumption or feed stored electricity back to the grid to ensure a consistent fre uency within of ith the networ needing an average of 800 MW of capacity and new flexible sources Ready required in the future, there’s a si eable and consistent demand that mission critical sites can tap into.

Initial Capital Costs

Conventional UPS

UPS (including omms ard

Riello UPS & RWE Alternative

,

,

Batteries (including abinets

£160,000

£80,000

Installation

,

,

ommissioning

,

Total

, ,

,

Total capex saving = 21% (equivalent of £80,000*) Annual Operating Costs

Conventional UPS

Riello UPS & RWE Alternative

UPS Maintenance

,

,

Remote Monitoring

,

£800

Total - ear perating ost

£6,000

£3,000

£60,000

£30,000

Total opex saving = 50% (equivalent of £3,000 per year*) * Please note all figures are illustrative only and all actual costs and savings are project dependent.

These calculations are based on a site with a typical load with batteries installed to provide 10 minutes backup and 1MWh of FFR. As you can see, the initial apex costs are approximately a fifth lower than a standard Operational costs are cut too thanks to the advanced battery and system monitoring reducing manual maintenance.

This has potential to save tens of thousands of pounds over the lifespan of a system, which is typically years. f operators consider all the benefits, then surely it’s obvious the time has come to ditch any doubts they have over battery storage ur exciting new concept helps transform your UPS from a reactive yet indispensable safety net into something that’s dynamically wor ing round the cloc to deliver lower costs, increase revenue opportunities, and enhanced reliability.

14

VIEWPOINT

Can data centres become truly sustainable?

With climate change high on the agenda, Ian Bitterlin dicusses the use of renewables and questions what it means to be ‘green’

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herever we look we find that the data centre has become the focus of a ‘greening’ mania.

This extends to the EU, along with Greenpeace et al, stating that all data centres should be powered by renewable energy.

There is even a renewable energy metric coming in the ISO/IEC 30134 series of metrics for resource effective data centres and we see that the term ‘renewably powered’ is increasingly being used as a marketing tag – in the hope that there are data centre clients that place the attribute higher than location, reliability and financial stability.

In my experience it is a nice-to-have on the menu card rather than a prime motivator, especially when in conjunction with low-cost electrical power and even the idea of having MCP June 2019

low-cost power is not ‘green’.

Energy should be valued highly, not squandered because it is cheap.

But, before we go deeper, I have to say that I am an environmentalist but also a realist and an engineer, and the combination makes me question both user motivation and the technical viability.

The biggest problem we have had from the early days of data centres is that the ICT load has been exponentially growing, fuelling data centre growth, but we have been deflected from questioning its effectiveness (or even societal worth) by focusing on data centre ‘efficiency’ and, in its worst expression, PUE. Three steps to sustainability But is ‘green’ the right descriptor? ‘Sustainability’ is a much better one and a basic

study of the subject will reveal that true sustainability is only achieved in three distinct steps, taken in strict order: 1. Reduce consumption 2. Improve the process losses 3. Renewably power In low-energy domestic housing, this manifests itself by changing user behaviour (dressing for the climate, not turning the heating on or airconditioning up), increasing thermal insulation and reusing waste heat and, finally, powering the house from a 100% renewable electrical grid.

In data centres no one talks about regulation of load type (favouring social worth), penalising low utilisation or high idle power or mandating frequent ICT hardware refreshes etc. Far too much emphasis is placed on PUE

where the ‘one’ is ignored but we bang on about renewably powering the data centre as if that alone is the solution.

The nearest exceptions to this are the social networking giants such as Google (with YouTube) and Facebook which, being fortunate in having one major application, do not idle hardware and refresh often. They also achieve low PUE because they can take risks with hardware and service uptime that many businesses could not and, finally, renewably power the facilities. But is the last feature more to do with their marketing/PR ambitions to be ‘seen to be green’ or simply that they build where power is cheap?

Let’s face it, we do not pay for the service they offer so every penny spent on energy is a missioncriticalpower.uk

15 The data centre has become the focus of a ‘greening’ mania but ‘sustainability’ would be a more apt descriptor

to achieve more waste heat – irrespective of the effectiveness of the load.

A few years ago, I was in an EU meeting held in Brussels where the ‘renewable power for data centres’ was being mooted as a possible Directive. I asked the question: “Why should pornography be renewably powered before such facilities as hospitals, care homes, universities or government tax offices?’

A finite resource Irony not being a strong point outside the UK, I tried to no avail to explain that 60% of the internet traffic of the world was made up of pornography and YouTube – so why should

(which is bound to increase with battery powered cars) there is less than 400 years’ of raw material reserves, so we may be looking for a new (or old) chemistry.

Our UK grid has another, possibly larger, problem. If we are to decarbonise our grid, then it must be expanded in capacity to deliver domestic and commercial heating, replacing our reliance on gas.

With heat pumps this could be a capacity expansion of nearly 60%, which would make data centres a smaller proportion of the grid load, perhaps down to 1% of the total – calling into question many current trends surrounding DSR and STOR etc.

Given that the data traffic is (still) no longer rising exponentially the future grid planning will de-focus on data centres and look closely into car batteries as a load and as a storage resource.

I am an environmentalist but also a realist and an engineer, and the combination makes me question both user motivation and the technical viability

direct cost of operation with the monies they accrue only coming from advertisers and selling our data?

However, Google and Facebook excepted, the current trend is to turn the three steps to sustainability on its head.

First power from renewables, missioncriticalpower.uk

try for an ever lower PUE and then allow unfettered consumption. Only a few facilities that are lucky enough to have infrastructure that can carry away their waste heat (ie in Stockholm) appear to achieve sustainability but they also prefer higher ICT load

it attract EU regulatory action?

The idea of a Directive never arose again. However, the point, which I strongly subscribe to, is that everything should be renewably powered, but it is a finite and valuable resource.

So should we pursue ‘sustainability’ for data centres?

Of course, we should – we must – but let’s not run away with the idea that it will make a huge difference, nor act as a magnet for clients – at least not for 100 or more years.

But could our grid ever be 100% renewable? Renewables are nearly all intermittent and depend upon energy storage if we are to avoid wholesale behaviour change. Electrical energy storage depends on batteries and the most ‘popular’ appear to be lithium-ion cells.

However, I read that at the current rate of production

The need for our energy supply source to have a very low impact on climate change is not one of being ‘renewable’ but of being ‘low-carbon’ and unless we drastically change our consumption behaviour then, to avoid rationing and organised rolling blackouts, a base-load generation (I would suggest 30%) of nuclear fission generation seems unavoidable.

Mind you, if we want to be rather more practical (and depressing) then we must accept that the next (the fourth or fifth?) ice age starts in 10,000 years and, unlike the previous incarnations, humans will largely fail to survive by the time it recedes.

I read that burning all our fossil fuel now will only bring the onset of the next ice age by 500 years closer… much closer to Hawkins’ prediction. l June 2019 MCP

16

DATA CENTRE TRENDS

Facebook is among the tech companies that have invested billions in Ireland

Ireland’s data centre investment tops ¤10bn Report highlights the positive impact that inward investment in data centre infrastructure is having on the Emerald Isle

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reland will see inward investment from data centres top ¤10bn by 2022, according to the latest industry update report from Host In Ireland in association with Bitpower.

Inward investment from data centres has trebled over the past four years, bringing the ever-growing average annual spend to ¤1.3bn each year.

The new report reveals the sector will have brought more than ¤10bn in investment by 2022, underpinning more than 100,000 jobs in the ICT sector.

The report also highlights the positive impact investment in data centre infrastructure has brought to Ireland in assisting in attracting leading tech companies to the area.

Speaking at the launch of the Q1 report, Garry Connolly, CEO of Host In Ireland, said: “The enormity of this investment has been transformational for Ireland over the past 10 years. The ICT sector in Ireland now supports more than 100,000 direct and indirect jobs. Our ability to provide the data infrastructure MCP June 2019

required by some of the largest companies in the world has meant that computer service related exports now top ¤69.3bn making it the largest export sector in the economy beating pharmaceuticals and the agrifood sector.”

The report adds that the increased levels of investment is expected to continue as

demand for ICT services and data surges globally.

Connolly added: “The ability to send, receive and store vast amounts of information as quickly and efficiently as possible, all being energised by green/renewable sources, is key to Ireland retaining its competitive advantage in the tech industry. The demand for

data globally only continues to grow and investment will continue so far as that trend lasts.”

Figures from construction consultant Mitchell McDermott reveal that more than half of the spend in data centre construction in the past 12 months was spent on equipment used to provide power and cooling, with one fifth spent on creating the building shell and architectural services.

Commenting on the typical spending breakdown of data centre construction investment, Anthony McDermott, director of Mitchell McDermott said: “We find that typically 55% of spend in the sector is on equipment including generators and other large items such as air conditioning units. A further 20% is spent on civil, structural and architectural services, 15% is spent on mechanical, electrical and plumbing services and 10% on preliminary construction costs.”

There are now 53 active data centres in Ireland with 29 currently in development.

Sixteen new data halls came online in 2018. l

Digital Realty expands in Ireland Digital Realty has announced the official opening of the second data centre on its Profile Park campus in Dublin. The 5MW expansion provides new and existing customers on the Profile Park campus with additional runway for growth in the capacity-constrained Irish market. The expansion of the campus brings Digital Realty’s total investment in Ireland to more than ¤200m, underscoring the company’s commitment to the country and confidence in the long-term local demand.

Recent research conducted by Censuswide on behalf of Digital Realty found that nearly half (47%) of Irish IT decision-makers are optimistic about the growth of the tech sector in Ireland. The survey of 250 senior Irish IT decision-makers revealed the areas they expect to have the biggest impact over the next five years include Brexit (56%), GDPR (36%) and the rollout of 5G (23%). Nearly half (46%) of Irish IT decision-makers surveyed see Ireland as a safe harbour for data, with Ireland quickly becoming a leading digital hub for Europe due to its skilled workforce (38%), competitive corporate tax regime (37%), and GDPR (30%).

Valerie Walsh, Digital Realty senior vice president, Portfolio Management, commented: “Our continued investment in Ireland demonstrates our confidence in the future growth prospects for the technology sector in the region. Our research shows that tech sector decision-makers share this optimism and expect the country will continue to flourish in the years to come.” missioncriticalpower.uk

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18

DATA CENTRE TRENDS

Operators fear increasing energy costs with 5G roll-out Operators are optimistic about the future services 5G will enable, but estimates suggest network energy consumption could increase by up to 170% by 2026

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ertiv, together with technology analyst firm 451 Research, has released the findings of an in-depth survey which reveals optimism about the services 5G will enable and the interplay with edge computing. The majority of telecoms operators surveyed believe the 5G era will start in earnest in 2021 in all geographies, with 88% of respondents planning to deploy 5G in 2021/22.

However, more than 90% of respondents believe 5G will result in higher energy costs and are interested in technologies and services that improve efficiency. This is consistent with internal analysis by Vertiv, which finds the move to 5G is likely to increase total network energy consumption by 150-170% by 2026, with the largest increases in macro, node and network

data centre areas.

The survey questioned more than 100 global telecoms operators about the opportunities and potential obstacles of deploying 5G services and the impact on edge computing adoption.

“The challenge for operators considering 5G will be choosing the most mature use cases, verticals and ecosystems where they can play a meaningful and sustainable role. The research Vertiv has undertaken into edge computing use cases and archetypes, together with this latest survey with 451, will help our operator customers and telecoms partners to build more robust business cases for 5G investments and associated edge compute deployments,” says Giordano Albertazzi, president for Vertiv in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Regarding edge and 5G specifically, the survey reveals that a large majority of operators have deployed (37%) or plan to deploy (47%) edge compute that is aligned with mobile infrastructure – also called multi-access edge computing (MEC).

“This survey brings us clarity on telecom operators’ hopes and fears around 5G and edge deployments,” says Brian Partridge, research vice president for 451 Research.

“The two toughest connectivity challenges for supporting 5G topologies were revealed to be upgrading access and aggregation layer networks and adding new backhaul links. Survey respondents indicated that the availability of high quality connectivity to distributed POPs and ease of site acquisition were viewed as the most critical enablers

to 5G success. We were frankly surprised by some of these results and believe it brings clarity to the level of transformation the industry now faces.”

Vertiv has also been conducting extensive research in the field, analysing more than 100 use cases to define four main edge computing archetypes and recently released a paper, Turning on 5G: Using Edge Archetypes to Identify the Most Mature Cases, to quantify the potential impact of 5G implementations.

The study looks at the potential obstacles to 5G adoption and the measures operators can take to mitigate them, such as Energy Savings as a Service (ESaaS). According to the survey, more than 90% of respondents said they are either extremely or moderately interested in ESaaS. l

Figure 1: Percentage energy consumption increase

Core

Edge

Access

Total

700% 600% 500% 400% 300% 200% 100% 0% Data centre

MSC/ASC/ MTX

BSC

Macro

Node

Large

Omni

Small

Pico

Total

Small 2017

2020-22

2024-26

Source: Vertiv/451 Research

MCP June 2019

missioncriticalpower.uk

EDGE DATA CENTRES

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Growth of ‘the edge’ will demand resilient solutions Remote edge sites will face significant challenges around resilience, remote monitoring and a lack of standardisation. So, what will be required to overcome these hurdles?

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y 2025, 75% of enterprise data is expected to be created and processed at the edge, according to Gartner. There has been a great deal of discussion of what actually constitutes ‘the edge’, in recent years, but for the Infrastructure Masons, the edge is defined as: “A computing enclosure/ space/facility geographically dispersed to be physically closer to the point of origin of data or a user base.”

Dave Johnson, executive VP, secure power division, at Schneider Electric, predicts there will be three large edge computing opportunities – in the commercial, industrial and telco sectors. The ‘commercial edge’ will encompass retail, healthcare, finance and education sectors, while the ‘industrial edge’ will include the oil and gas, mining, automotive and manufacturing sectors. For the Telco sector, the edge will be located in remote locations, close to cell towers and base stations.

Johnson points out that all three opportunities face the challenges of poor resiliency, a lack of remote monitoring and management, a lack of standardisation and integration, and a large number of sites with limited IT staff.

Jim Simonelli – SVP, emerging businesses, at Schneider Electric, explains that the move to ‘the edge’ is being driven by latency reasons and the need for data privacy, as well as bandwidth.

However, the edge data centre needs to be always available, and “serviced and managed in a costeffective manner”.

“Businesses cannot afford to have a service team based on site, waiting for something to missioncriticalpower.uk

Speaking at a press summit at Schneider Electric’s Andover offices, Dave Johnson discussed approaches to delivering resilience at ‘the edge’ happen,” comments Simonelli.

“Systems need to be simple to replace and simple to manage.”

To support IT professionals in developing a strategy to deploy IT at the edge, Schneider Electric has released a new White Paper, entitled Solving Edge Computing Infrastructure Challenges (apc.com/ wp?wp=277). The paper creates a structure for anticipating potential issues at the edge and details how to identify an ecosystem of partners with which to collaborate, integrate and deliver all of the essential infrastructure components required.

The White Paper highlights a need for a pre-integrated

We are collecting over 450 million data points per day

and collaborative approach within the vendor ecosystem, in addition to rule-based configuration tools, reference designs and cloud-based management software, to make edge solutions faster to deploy, more resilient, and costeffective for customers.

This collaborative approach requires an integrated ‘edge’ ecosystem comprised of IT and infrastructure vendors, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), systems integrators and managed service providers (MSPs), who work together to simplify, accelerate, and ensure resiliency at the edge. The ecosystem works for the end user to monitor and maintain all edge assets, while delivering greater levels of uptime and cost-effectiveness. The ecosystem, in effect, becomes the extended workforce of the end user.

Additionally, today’s businesses must rely on cloudbased management software, ie data centre management as a service (DMaaS) solutions

and on-premise data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) tools, to manage multiple edge data centres efficiently in real-time. Using a combination of pre-integrated hardware solutions, in addition to cloud-based software, can reduce field engineering costs by between 25% and 40%, while increasing uptime and availability.

This monitoring technology should draw on ‘big data analytics’ to deliver better performance with predictive capability. EcoStruxure IT is an example of one such development –a cloud-based solution, the system not only provides remote monitoring and management of assets, but also provides foresight into potential risks by leveraging global benchmarks and analytics in the EcoStruxure ‘data lake’.

Speaking at a press summit in Andover, Massachusetts, Johnson, commented: “This is already a reality. There are over 160,000 connected devices and more than 2,000 users are monitoring their assets via the EcoStruxure IT platform. We are collecting over 450 million data points per day.”

To simplify deployment and management of physical infrastructure at the edge, Schneider Electric also announced a new solution for micro data centres that couples the company’s APC physical infrastructure with Cisco’s HyperFlex Edge, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). The customisable micro data centre has been preengineered to seamlessly join APC and Cisco equipment for a solution that is pre-integrated, remotely monitorable and physically secure. l June 2019 MCP

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DATA CENTRE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

How an edge data centre is helping to save lives...

For the Wellcome Sanger Institute, data centre resilience is critical to safeguarding precious genome sequencing data. The 4MW data centre contains the potential answers to tackling the world’s deadliest diseases

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hen the Ebola outbreak hit Sierra Leone, leading to more than 11,000 deaths and 28,600 infections, genetic sequencing at the Wellcome Sanger Institute played a vital part in understanding and curbing the further spread of the deadly disease. The charity is one of the premier centres of genomic discovery in the world and the data held within its 4MW data centre is of the highest global importance – playing a leading role in national and international projects spanning: cancer, infectious disease, human epidemiology and developmental disorders.

MCP June 2019

In recent years, researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute have discovered thousands of genes essential for cancer’s survival and ranked which ones show the most promise as drug targets for developing new treatments. The institute is also embarking on other ambitious projects, including The Darwin Tree of Life project, which aims to sequence all complex life within the British Isles. This is part of a much wider plan, known as the Earth BioGenome Project, which aims to map the genomics for all life on earth.

Resilience at the edge The heavy demands of data

generation and analytics requires compute at the point of data generation and the proximity requirement makes it one of the largest edge data centres in the world.

To support the huge growth in demand for genome sequencing, the Institute’s data centre campus – based at Hinxton, Cambridgeshire – has moved from being operational five days per week, 9-5; to being ‘always on’, 24/7, 365 days per year.

Sequencing requires a huge amount of computing power and the output at the site produces a staggering 2TB data per day, per genome. The Wellcome Trust site currently

36K

The cores of compute required for genome sequencing

missioncriticalpower.uk

21 Downtime means that £36,000 worth of chemical components have to be replaced for each sequencing machine.

As there are 25 machines, this gives a potential cost of £900,000 per day.

Added to this is the intangible cost of not being able to perform vital research ageing, legacy data centres and a new 1.2MW high density rack facility, built by ISG. EfficiencyIT, a UK-based reseller and Elite Partner to Schneider Electric, installed EcoStruxure IT Expert software to enable a small team (comprising just three personnel) to manage the facility efficiently and reliably.

For the Wellcome Sanger Institute, ‘the edge’ is where the scientists operate the sequencing machines. There are around 25 of these machines, each costing around £2m – all sequencing the human genome for the

holds over 150PB of data, which cannot be deleted, due to the global importance of this scientific knowledge. This vast amount of data is not tolerant of outages, however, so ensuring the resilience of the physical infrastructure is vital.

The campus has previously experienced utility power issues (with 12 brownout periods during 2018), so monitoring the health of the site’s UPS systems was an important aspect of delivering reliable uptime.

Data centre manager Simon Binley required a software solution that could offer complete visibility for three missioncriticalpower.uk

Genetic sequencing requires a huge amount of computing power – 2TB a day, per genome at the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s Hinxton data centre campus

betterment of mankind. In the past, it took 10 years to map just one human genome. Today, these machines are mapping one to two human genomes per day. If they lose a UPS and there is an outage – a day of genome sequencing research could potentially be lost.

“There is a lot of discussion around the cost of downtime for data centres, but in this instance, downtime means that £36,000 worth of chemical components have to be replaced for each sequencing machine.

As there are 25 machines, this gives a potential cost of £900,000 per day. Added to this is the intangible cost of not being able to perform vital research. This makes data centre uptime absolutely mission critical,” comments Nick Ewing, managing director at EfficiencyIT. “Ensuring availability for our researchers is vital,” adds Binley. “It is really important that we understand the state of the data centres and the environment. The software gives us a granular view of the metrics that really drive the data centres – including the temperature and power. The ability to see what is going on, through the EcoStruxure IT software, also allows us to build efficiencies into the data centres. When we drive efficiencies, we make cost savings – money that goes straight back into the charity’s live-saving research.”

Data centre insights The system provides a physical representation of the data centre – including the inlet and outlet temperature for every » June 2019 MCP

22

DATA CENTRE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

single rack, as well as providing intelligence on capacity and load. Using this tool, Simon Binley can manage capacity planning, optimise power and cooling, as well as the physical space and, ultimately, achieve the goal of detecting any issues before they become problem.

“The system allows me to remotely monitor what is happening, at any time of day, via the EcoStruxure smartphone app, and converse with our engineers when there are potential issues. It provides an early warning and avoids any delays. It has been a real game-changer for us,” Binley comments.

The institute needed a single interface that would bring together the disparate metrics into one place. The engineers no longer have to access many different platforms to obtain all the measurements they need to understand exactly how the data centre is performing – from the UPSs to individual PDUs. “The visibility and information obtained, via EcoStruxure IT, allows the institute to unlock the engineers’ time to support the physical IT hardware throughout the data centre,” comments Binley.

“This has led to an efficiency gain in their ability to respond to faulty hard drives. ” He explains that the disks have a limited shelf life and need replacing on a regular

a powerful tool,” Ewing continues.

“It enables us to understand how individual assets are performing and replace equipment before it fails. You can diagnose whether a PDU has a fault, for example. This means maintenance can be carried out in a more proactive way. The plan is also to look at mechanical elements to make the data centre more efficient.

We are at the beginning of that journey,” says Binley.

Nick Ewing, managing director at EfficiencyIT (left) and Wellcome Sanger Institute data centre manager Simon Binley (right), speaking at a Schneider Electric press summit held at Andover in Massachusetts. Resilience and energy efficiency are core to the data centre operations and the latest DCIM technology is delivering key insights to improve performance basis: “The software enables the engineers to focus on the tasks they really need to be doing rather than spending time looking through half a dozen different systems to find an answer on how the data centre is performing. This is a huge advantage.”

“We have basically given Simon the eyes into his data centre,” adds Ewing. “The institute’s edge comprises 25-30 APC Smart-UPSs and we are able to provide intelligent, predictive information, based

on Schneider Electric’s huge amount of acquired analytic data.”

Regular reports are provided, detailing which UPSs are nearing the end of their lives, so that the Institute can schedule their replacement.

“By taking this proactive step, we can save the institute many thousands of pounds worth of lost chemicals and several days of lost days of genome sequencing. The ability to give this forward planning and visibility, is

Standardisation and integration Standardisation was an important requirement for the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the campus includes a variety of infrastructure from Schneider Electric. Today, these components enable visibility of the physical layer and include: • • • • •

APC APC APC APC APC

Racks NetShelter in 95% of the data centre space Metered Gen 2 PDUs in 95% of the data centre NetBotz devices throughout for environmental monitoring Temp and Humidity devices Symmetra Megawatt UPS

The Schneider Electric management tools include: • EcoStruxure IT Data Center Expert to monitor the core data centre. This is being expanded to the edge comms rooms and sequencing environment.

• EcoStruxure IT Data Center Operations • EcoStruxure IT – Energy Efficiency Module – to provide PUE and granular electrical data to all four data centres individually and jointly • EcoStruxure IT Expert – this brings all the core devices into the Schneider Electric data lake, providing access via a smart phone app, including analytical data

MCP June 2019

Driving efficiency The Wellcome Trust is also concerned about its carbon footprint and the sustainability of its compute operations.

Simon Binley wanted a software solution that offered enhanced visibility of energy use, with the ability to identify areas for improvement. The EcoStruxure IT Energy Efficiency Module provides PUE and granular electrical data for all four data centres. The most recent data centre build on the campus has also incorporated diesel rotary uninterruptible power supply units (DRUPS), which has eliminated the use of batteries in the fourth quadrant.

“This means we no longer have to swap out batteries every five years, which has an environment impact around disposal,” says Binley.

In the future, the data centre team plans to use the software to raise the temperature of the data centre to an optimum level, to create additional efficiencies, while alternative approaches to cooling may also be considered.

“We are in the process of investigating whether we may need to increase densities and move to immersion cooling technology. The plan is to reach a point where, for individual racks and rows, the cooling can be matched to the load and, therefore, drive efficiencies even further. In the long term, the ambition is to ensure that the costs of data centre operation are decreased even further, ensuring the Institute can maximise its budget for important scientific research,” Binley concludes. l missioncriticalpower.uk

24

POWER DISTRIBUTION

A

s power densities increase, colocation and hyperscale data centre operators need to maximise every opportunity to reduce power consumption – and associated costs. One such opportunity is to use energy saving 380V direct current (DC), which could be a game changer for the entire data centre industry.

Today, the industrial world uses power based on alternating current; there is, however, a movement towards using DC power sources in a wide variety of applications, including sustainable power (photovoltaics, wind and fuel cells), microgrids (residential and small commercial) and data centres.

Telecommunications systems and DC Power Already proven within the telecommunications sector, telco companies have successfully used DC power solutions for decades. Historically, exchanges have operated on -48VDC for reasons of safety, durability (lack of cathodic corrosion), fault tracing and easy battery integration. However, some facilities are now moving to a higher DC voltage for new data centres.

A driving force behind innovation and learning in this sector – and helping to deliver learnings to wider industry – is the Open Compute Project (OCP). Created as a collaborative community to support the growing demands on compute infrastructure, the OCP is an organisation that shares designs of data centre products among companies including Facebook, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Google, Microsoft, Seagate Technology, Dell, Rackspace, Cisco, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, Lenovo and Alibaba Group.

When Facebook found it was outgrowing its traditional infrastructure in 2009, the business initiated a project to design the world’s most energy efficient data centre. In 2011, Facebook shared these MCP June 2019

Why make the switch to DC power?

Socomec’s Jean–Yves Chaboute argues that data centres can improve effiency by moving to DC distribution designs and launched the OCP in conjunction with Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Andy Bechtolsheim.

The mission of the group is to spur rapid innovation across a global community, sharing intellectual property in order to encourage the IT industry to evolve. The Open Compute Summit recently started a group dedicated to telecommunications technology firms that deploy DC solutions.

In 2016, Google announced development of a 48V rack solution, and is working with Facebook and others to further the development of a DC solution within the Open Compute environment.

The IBM supercomputer, used by the MET office, is an example where DC distribution has already been tried and tested. This application is currently being supplied with 520VDC. While the vast majority of data centres in the UK currently use AC distribution, DC distribution can bring advantages to any type of data centre by reducing the number of stages in the electrical system. In short, DC/ DC conversion is simpler than multiple AC/DC and DC/AC conversion stages.

Modern data centres typically rely on traditional AC voltage to DC voltages at the server (ie utility power --> primary/ secondary power distribution systems --> uninterruptible power supply [UPS] --> power distribution unit [PDU] --> server). Each conversion causes losses in an environment where missioncriticalpower.uk

25 efficiency is key.

Colocation is a likely candidate for DC distribution, due to the intense competition for efficiency, while the benefit for edge data centres would be for remote sites where all or part of the energy supply is from renewables (solar) and battery storage is employed.

Typically this would be telecom applications or containerised data centres.

Pros of 380V DC power Clearly, the success of DC solutions within the telecommunications industry can bring highly transferrable advantages to every sector – whether creating a new facility or upgrading existing infrastructure with a simple retrofit.

When deploying a 380VDC solution to power critical data centre equipment instead of AC power, efficiency has been proven to increase between 8% and 10%, with more efficient 380VDC motors and controls being used. With increased reliability and fewer conversions, both upfront expenditure and operating costs are lower. Furthermore, with a simpler design and

implementation, system maintenance costs are reduced.

Physical space requirements are less – with smaller bus and copper sizes being used – so more server area white space is available. Distributed energy storage can be used in DC systems and 380V DC microgrids can be developed.

Is DC power right for your data centre?

DC power solutions are just one way that data centre owners and operators can save money and energy. With careful planning and design, and working with the right partner, every data centre can benefit from the unique advantages that DC power has to offer.

One solution – ideal for retrofit and for monitoring both AC and DC power – is Diris Digiware, from integrated power specialist Socomec.

Able to monitor not only energy consumption, the higher end voltage and current modules can also monitor power quality events and max demand – enabling better, more informed decision making.

Furthermore, the accuracy of measurements is guaranteed according to IEC 61557-12; class

With careful planning and design, and working with the right partner, every data centre can benefit from the unique advantages that DC power has to offer 0.5 from 2% to 120% of the nominal current on the global chain when associated with the Digiware sensors.

Digiware centralises measurements for the main incoming circuit, all sub feeds and branch-circuits locally then communicates them to DCIM / EMS / SCADA / BMS software solutions over multiple open protocols (MODBUS, SNMP and BAC net).

By delivering a compact and powerful solution to track power usage – for both main and individual circuits – Diris Digiware is ideal for any current rating, for a large number of

circuits and for new or existing installations using solid core or split-core current sensors.

Thanks to the system’s voltage adaptors, Diris Digiware is suitable for both telecoms sites (-48VDC) and more recent data centre and electrical infrastructures operating at higher voltages such as 380VDC. The future DC distribution is now becoming a reality and this will lead to a simplification of data centre architecture, as well as reducing risk. As always the enduser gains need to be quantified before DC distribution can be widely deployed and operations staff will need familiarising with the new equipment and architecture.

In the next five years, we will see some trial projects in universities, but also in industry, as well as some developments for remote edge data centres.

As there is increasing adoption of this approach, operators will require DC monitoring solutions to validate the benefits of DC architecture; not only for efficiency but also for power quality, and Socomec’s solutions are ready for this. l

Data centre trends highlighted at DCW In addition to the move to DC distribution, Socomec highlighted a number of other key trends for 2019 at Data Centre World.

Socomec UK sales manager Alex Metcalfe commented that data centres are increasingly moving to lithium-ion batteries and this has the potential to offer significant benefits that go beyond a data centre’s four walls, by helping to stabilise the national grid.

The move to lithium-ion is not only reducing footprint, he pointed out, but also opens up new revenue opportunities by offering the ability to perform grid services using the UPS. “Instead of being seen as burden on the grid, data missioncriticalpower.uk

centres can become part of the solution, particularly as we integrate more and more renewables into the grid – creating greater instability,” he commented.

Phil Dunn, Socomec UK sales manager, also reported that there has been a resurgence of the static switch: “There is no doubt they improve resilience,” he commented.

Other trends include the increasing popularity of modular UPS, which are able to drive efficiencies.

However, there are also emerging technologies which can now help reduce downtime, by optimising the management of UPS assets.”

Socomec highlighted one such breakthrough

on its stand at Data Centre World – SoLive UPS. By integrating smart technology within new or existing electrical architecture, it is now possible to ensure power continuity, reliability and optimised efficiency– via your smartphone.

Socomec UK managing director Colin Dean explained: “The effective management of every UPS within an electrical infrastructure is fundamental to ensuring optimised performance. By considering the product from the perspective of our customers as well as end-users – and harnessing the power of the latest digital and mobile technology – we

have created a disruptive approach to the way that UPS equipment is managed.”

The solution is claimed to offer UPS surveillance “anytime, anywhere”.

The latest mobile technology is being deployed to simplify the ongoing management of installed UPS systems – and to mitigate against downtime. SoLive UPS collects data from all installed UPS systems – across the entire system architecture – and presents information relating to events and thresholds by showing alarms and status on a live dashboard.

This enables remote realtime analysis and instant notifications of anomalies.

June 2019 MCP

26

POWER DISTRIBUTION

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lectricity is like air and water – something that we have all come to take for granted. But there is now clear evidence that we cannot assume our energy sources can be forever guaranteed.

Data centres rely on a stable electricity supply 24/7, but our future supply is far from assured. National Grid has recently reported that there is just 1.2% spare capacity. Any additional energy demands – something as simple as a cold winter – could see an increase in the mains disturbances such as brown outs and black outs which will have a significant impact on the uptime of our data centre infrastructure.

There has been a great deal written about reducing energy consumption using new IT cooling methods such as in-line cooling and aisle containment systems, which is where the majority of electrical energy consumption is consumed. But electrical power distribution is also an area that can be optimised, and that requires a review of the internal power distribution of a rack, ie the power distribution unit (PDU).

There are a number of key elements to selecting PDUs, which include:

Choosing the right PDU Mark Guest, Rittal’s product manager for IT power distribution, offers practical advice for optimising power distribution

Does it do the job?

PDUs distribute power, but to match your requirements to the right PDU you should consider: What is the overall current consumption required from the PDU? This is dependent on the aggregated power consumption of the IT devices that are connected to the PDU. PDUs

are rated in amps, eg 3, 16 and 32 amps, so match the PDU to the nearest rating.

Do I need single or three phase power?

Again this is dependent on the total demand of the IT devices;

Data centres rely on a stable electricity supply 24/7, but our future supply is far from assured. National Grid has recently reported that there is just 1.2% spare capacity MCP June 2019

as IT power demand increases, it may be necessary for a three phase PDU to be used, typically where demand exceeds 8kW per rack.

How many sockets and what type of sockets do I need?

The number of sockets is dependent on the number of devices you are using, eg 10 servers would need 10 sockets.

The socket type is typically determined by the device that is using that socket. Commonly used internationally are C13 outlets, rated to 8A; or C19 outlets rated to 16A or, more

often than not a mixture of both.

Do I need intelligent PDU eg metering and switching capability?

Advance features such as remote monitoring and switching sockets off remotely really can change your understanding and control of your power consumption.

They also improve resilience.

Does it do it efficiently?

To reduce power we must monitor it and then put in place strategies in response. missioncriticalpower.uk

Monitoring can be done either at the incomer of the PDU in terms of the total power being drawn from the whole PDU, or it can be focused on an individual device’s demands from the socket.

The latter provides a greater granularity for analysis but not all meters have the same accuracy – it may range from 1% to 5% – so it is worth investigating into the technical specifications.

PDU electronics also consume power at levels which can be significant, especially in a large-scale data centre, given that it can range from as little as 6W to 60W. If intelligent PDUs are installed in a 200 rack data centre with dual PDUs in the rack then their power consumption could be as little as 2.4kW or as much as 24kW. The switching function allows users to remotely shutdown individual sockets and to ‘hard boot’ any device that is connected to it. It is worth checking which type of switch device (or relay) is within the PDU construction, either monostable or bi-stable.

The monostable needs a permanent supply of power to change state and stay there. Bringing it back means removing the power. The bi-stable needs to be pulsed with electricity to change state and pulsed again to come back.

Bi-stable therefore uses less power than monostable, which can again be significant in terms of the aggregate consumption from a lot of sockets.

How reliable is it?

Typically bi-stable relays have a higher mean time between failure (MTBF) than the lowercost monostable option – in excess of 80,000 hours. This is significant given that most PDUs operate at the back of the rack where ambient temperatures can exceed 40°C, which, unsurprisingly, can shorten the lifespan of the conventional relay.

Metering also has an impact on the overall resilience of the power system. It allows missioncriticalpower.uk

users to determine their power consumption and how close the system may be getting to the tripping points of the circuit breakers, particularly if warning alarms are also enabled.

Is it easy to integrate (mechanically and through software)?

Larger PDUs must fit into the back of the rack. However, if possible they should not extend into the 19” space because of the potential this has for conflict with 19” mountable equipment. So, mounting PDU positions that sit in parallel with the 19” angles can be beneficial and should be possible even in 600mm wide racks if the PDU profile is slim enough.

Most intelligent PDUs use SNMP protocol to communicate so simple integration into a DCIM or NMS is easily achieved.

Will it last the lifetime of the data centre?

This is an almost impossible question to answer because it is very hard to predict the development of future data centre technologies.

It would be sensible to allow for future capacity by providing additional sockets within the PDU and also to ensure that you have spare capacity from the PDU incoming feed. If you work in a fast-changing environment, then it is worth considering modular PDUs that allow you to add additional sockets if required.

They are slightly more expensive but they offer greater flexibility, enabling you to change the socket configuration without taking the IT system down.

Summary The constraints of the electrical grid and the need to lower our power consumption are two issues that are not going away and we must all respond accordingly. PDUs allow you to profile your IT power demands, and if you can’t measure it you cannot improve it. l

28

UNINTERRUPTIBLE POWER SUPPLIES

UPS topology drives increase in uptime Advances in UPS design are increasing efficiency and resilience, writes Centiel UK managing director Mike Elms

I

n any industry, there is always innovation and advancement. In the UPS world, there have been changes in topology from single standalone units to multiple redundant configurations, the establishment of the transformerless based design and the modular concept.

These changes have been driven primarily by the increasing cost of energy, hence seeking higher and higher efficiency was the goal, but also by the nirvana of eliminating single points of failure, attaining the highest availability – ie no downtime.

Most major manufacturer’s UPS equipment have very

Centiel’s 4th generation UPS CumulsPower True Modular UPS

high online operating efficiencies and there are now more modular type systems on the market. High efficiency is more or less a given, nowadays, so how do you achieve the highest availability?

One innovation is Distributed Active Redundant Architecture (DARA), taking downtime from seconds to the milliseconds level. This technology and modular hot-swap capability provides availability of 9 nines (99.999999999). DARA is a concept introduced by Centiel into its 4th generation UPS CumulsPower True Modular UPS design. So, what exactly is DARA?

Centiel’s 4th generation UPS CumulusPower True Modular UPS

29 D is for Distributed Distributed means that a decentralised architecture is utilised so that there is no single active component which can be a potential single point of failure.

There is no single control board, no single system static switch and no single parallel bus. Each module within the frame is a UPS in its own right.

Each module is actually a fully independent and self-isolating intelligent module with all the building blocks of a standalone UPS unit – including rectifier, inverter, static switch, battery charger, intelligence (CPU and communication logic) and mimic panel.

Take the modules out of the frame, put them beside each other on the floor, cable them up and you have a traditional looking multi-UPS parallel redundant system.

For most modular UPS units, however, the commonly used single system, separate static switch is of most concern, as it can become a potential single point of failure.

A is for Active A is the automated democratic decision-making process

Instead of one brain, there are multiple brains which work together to make the best decision for the whole Mike Elms, Centiel which is the real differentiator in DARA. It means the sum of the decision determines the total system action or reaction to any issues.

In a standard modular UPS, where modules share the load, if one has a problem it could signal all the modules go to static bypass.

However, a true modular UPS with DARA makes democratic decisions; when a fault is recognised in one module, but not the others, they will remain online while the problematic module is switched off automatically and isolated.

The automated process removes some of the human element which has led to data centre power failures in recent years.

R is for Redundant From a technological point

of view, building redundancy into the UPS system increases availability. Redundancy simply means adding extra modules that will support the load in the event of failure.

By utilising a true N+1 configuration, a failure in one module results in that module being isolated, leaving the remaining modules supporting the load. This results in high availability, while the rapid hot swap modular concept offers the lowest mean time to repair.

It takes minutes to replace a module.

However, duplication and redundancy of UPS components must also apply to communication between modules too. The most simple communications bus is a single cable; a break could potentially compromise the entire system. A ring circuit eliminates this as the signals

can simply communicate the other way around the ring.

For increased assurance, a triple mode communications bus is provided. As the name suggests, there are three paths of communication with three separate ring circuits, and three brains in each module communicating with the three brains in all the other modules.

A is for Architecture The overall architecture in Centiel’s CumulusPower modular design is a completely decentralised one, where no common component can act as a potential single point of failure. Instead of one brain, there are multiple brains that work together to make the best decision for the whole.

Conclusion The purpose of a UPS system must be to protect critical loads with the highest level of efficiency and availability.

There are many different solutions to the same problem, therefore, it is important to check the configuration and the definition of a modular system carefully and seek expert advice before making an expensive purchase. l

30

DATA CENTRE DESIGN

If we are using advanced algorithms such as artificial intelligence (AI) in our data centres, then why aren’t we using the same intelligent technology to help design new data centres in the first place? Sudlows’ computational engineer, Sam Woodhead, examines the question and explains how CFD simulation can make a difference

How CFD is transforming data centre design

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t’s an interesting time to be alive: we can now order food online and have it delivered on the same day; money itself is becoming increasingly more abstract, thanks to cryptocurrency and large scale data centres; and even the development of drone technology has the unintended consequences of causing the recent shutdown of major airports.

In the past two decades it has become ever easier to be more productive in less time, with powerful tools now more economically accessible. These exciting new possibilities are almost entirely due to technology, and with further advancements on the horizon, such as artificial intelligence, it is certain that this trend will continue in the next decade.

Many modern technical innovations now demand both higher computing power and guaranteed availability to succeed. As the centralisation of computing resources continues, motivated by the growing public usage of virtualisation and containerisation of software services, we are seeing major data centres appear globally, all built with increasingly more efficient and ambitious methods of cooling.

Furthermore, these large data centres need to save on cost by being extremely space MCP June 2019

efficient, packing in as many utilities as possible into a set footprint.

These digital arteries of the modern age are slowly becoming more clogged, and for facilities that decide to use both air and liquid based cooling the question now is: how powerful does my cooling equipment need to be to prevent the clogging?

This cannot be answered simply with a hand calculator, nor can we build an

with computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

Prior to any construction works, a 3D model of the building can be created to determine exactly how much air-pressure loss will occur within the cooling process.

This CFD modelling allows you to test to be sure that when you physically install your equipment, you have selected the ideal cooling equipment. If you over-predict, your initial costs will be high and your

and simulation method is shown in figure 1.

The problem with this traditional method is that it requires a design engineer to physically redesign all the equipment locations and specifications, by hand, every time, and then repetitively reperform the simulation process until all the specifications are met.

The good news is that a new simulation model is rapidly becoming adopted by industries

Modern CFD now goes a lot deeper in detail than simply checking to see if your building design was compliant to the specification or not Sam Woodhead, Sudlows experimental model – which would be the engineering equivalent of constructing a building to simply knock it down again.

The big question alongside this is, if we are using advanced algorithms such as artificial intelligence (AI) in our data centres, then why aren’t we using the same intelligent technology to help design these new data centres in the first place?

Well perhaps it is time that we answered such questions

equipment inefficient; if you under-predict, you will have to buy new equipment.

Quite simply, checking for virtual problems using CFD will cost you a lot less time and money than having to expensively change and correct any problems during or postconstruction.

Modern CFD now goes a lot deeper in detail than simply checking to see if your building design was compliant to the specification or not. For example, the traditional design

and organisations that specialise in simulation (see figure 2).

In this new model, a basic template design of the facility is initially put together. Next, specific areas that are critical to the efficiency/cost/performance of the facility are then designed by the CFD software itself. The simulation results are no longer required to be evaluated by a design engineer, but are in fact multi-tested by the simulation and then rapidly redesigned until the final specification outcome is achieved. missioncriticalpower.uk

31 Figure 1: Traditional design and simulation method

Human process Machine process

(Re)design

facility

Simulate

Specification

facility

met?

Finished

Figure 2: New simulation model method

Provisional

design

Simulate

Computational

facility

(re)design

Specification

Finished

met?

Figure 4: Possible failure combinations and rising complexity

Combinations to consider

120

Single unit

Two units

80 60 40 20 0 3

7

5

9

13

11

15

Cooling/power/heating component quantity

fans underneath tiles to make up for a poorly balanced flow region. It is both faster and less expensive to be provided with a final exact design, using a detailed louvre schedule, instead of falling into the ‘post design’ trap that will take more time and money to reactively correct than is necessary.

Another aspect of data centres that merits the use of CFD design automation is the combination of failures that can occur in the design of

Regular tile design

redundant systems (see figure 4). For example, should a client decide to select a through-wall cooling system, in which there are six cooling units and two of these units can potentially fail, then how many possible failure combinations are there to consider?

In this design there would be 15 combinations to consider, which are time-consuming to set up manually and where it is likely that human error in the setup would cause one situation

Optimised tile design

Figure 3: The CFD simulation can alter the variable hot-aisle size and cooling equipment positions by adjusting how open or closed each louvre should be missioncriticalpower.uk

Three units

100

Temperature (°C)

This new simulation method can save a significant amount of time, simply because it avoids the relatively slow process of human interaction to redesign.

Furthermore, it does so based on solid engineering evidence – the benefit here is that it can redesign considerably more times than a human without getting bored.

A clear example of the immediate benefits of CFD enhanced design can be seen in the use of search algorithms used to automatically balance the flow rates through supply and return air tiles in a data centre.

The CFD simulation can alter the variable hot-aisle size and cooling equipment positions by adjusting how open or closed each louvre should be (see figure 3).

This newly optimised form of simulation eliminates the previous error cycle of ‘post design’ design, such as placing

to be repeated and another to missed entirely. But, with the aid of CFD automated simulation, we can now be certain that every scenario has been considered and rigorously tested in order to detect any potential worst case scenario that could occur.

As can be seen from the ongoing trend, sophisticated developments in computing are requiring equally sophisticated infrastructures and control systems to support them.

This is a trend that Sudlows is seeing in its design process and one of the major reasons we develop our own bespoke software, integrating existing software libraries and making use of application programming interface (APIs) that can automate and enhance our design and development.

Modern problems require modern solutions, and we make use of these in order to improve both efficiency and performance of your data centre. l June 2019 MCP

32

THERMAL OPTIMISATION

Critical cooling FläktGroup’s Mike Hayes highlights the areas which should not be overlooked to ensure cooling systems run smoothly

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on-IT infrastructure plays a crucial role in keeping a data centre operational and represents a significant proportion of hardware investment.

Employing best practice in the maintenance and operations of support systems such as critical cooling helps to maximise availability and energy efficiency, and ensures that back-up units kick in when needed. Data centres should prioritise the following: Charge it right Refrigerant charges within CRAC units are critical and the old school methods of simply charging to sight glass or gauges are long since passed. More robust methods including the reading of suction superheat, liquid sub cooling and discharge superheat, throughout the compressor operating envelope, are all now required. Overcharging of these systems has become commonplace and is usually due to a lack of experience and knowledge.

Failure to get this element correct can result in compressor failure. It is important to remember products vary MCP June 2019

from one manufacturer to the next, which is why many develop detailed servicing and maintenance work schedules tailored to the needs of their ranges.

Clean coils Cleaning condenser coils is an essential task in any planned preventative maintenance regime. Depending on the type of dirt and contaminants which need to be removed, the coils can be cleaned by one of three methods: chemical cleaning, manual brushing or a pressure wash.

Despite the simplicity of this procedure, it can often be overlooked by technicians who do not fully understand the principles of close control cooling units and the role they play in a data centre. If left uncleaned, the coils will clog up, resulting in refrigerant high pressure trips and ultimately, system downtime.

Swap out components It sounds obvious, but parts like air filters and humidifier cylinders should be replaced regularly. Fläkt Group’s servicing teams change the former in its units twice a

year, and the latter, depending on water quality, two to four times a year. Old humidifier cylinders prevent optimum system performance, raising energy usage and costs.

Clogged air filters can lead to system failures, which can be expensive to rectify.

Spread the load One or two additional units are often specified to provide back-up should any unit fail.

To ensure that duplicate units can function and help meet the cooling load when needed, these should be used regularly in the same way normal units are employed. By spreading the load, the risk of breakdowns in the normal units can also be reduced.

Refrigerant charges within CRAC units are critical – Mike Hayes, FläktGroup

Secure the network To implement the above, all the units – including back-up ones – should be networked so that the operator can set them up to work on a rotational basis and control changeovers. This does also mean that the network cooling system needs to be protected from cyber-attacks.

Therefore all units, including duplicate ones, should be linked to the data centre’s IT infrastructure. Fläkt Group’s solutions can be connected to a building’s network via a pCOWEB card, which restricts access to the units’ IP addresses, and allows the data centre operator to monitor the system’s security.

Protect power supply If power supply to cooling equipment is interrupted, fans, compressors and humidifiers will stop working. Therefore, any cooling solution used in data centres should be able to switch to a different feed in case of mains power outage.

For example, Fläkt Group’s units have a remote start stop signal that can be connected to a back-up generator via the building management system.

Some systems allow the units to have dual power supply so that they can run on electricity from an UPS or generator if needed.

Ensure expert servicing Maintenance is often contracted out to a building facilities provider based solely on cost. However, while engineers who have attended short training programmes such as F-Gas courses can work with air conditioning and refrigeration systems, close control units in missioncritical environments are best maintained by manufacturertrained engineers.

After all, products vary from one manufacturer to the next, so it is important for servicing and maintenance technicians to have a detailed knowledge of how particular precision control units work, and to understand their impact in a mission-critical setting. l missioncriticalpower.uk

34

ENERGY MANAGEMENT

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here would we be these days without data centres?

They house the infrastructure behind of all our business data systems and are the backbone of the internet, and mobile applications. Nevertheless, the data centre is greedy, it is hungry for more energy to manage the IT infrastructure, to power the networked computers it houses 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and to maintain the cooling systems which allow them to keep running.

Because of this, tightly controlled environmental conditions are crucial not only to ensure the uptime of the equipment within the data centre but also to keep control of energy costs.

The data centre market is expanding rapidly; the imminent arrival of 5G will only increase this rate of expansion. The growth in IoT deployment, digital transformation and big data will mean more data must be stored and processed.

The associated energy demand brings with it both environmental and cost considerations.

Energy costs money and, on 1 April, we saw a 45% increase in the Climate Change Levy (CCL) meaning an increase in non-commodity costs (charges on an energy bill that are not the electricity) from 0.583p/kWh to 0.847p/kWh – this was due to the abolition of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC). The CCL is an environmental tax on energy delivered to nondomestic users, it has been designed to incentivise energy efficiency and to reduce carbon emissions.

In addition, energy costs are estimated to rise by 20% next year, meaning the time is now for data centre managers to maximise their energy efficiency and benefit from the many opportunities offered by the Capacity Market, and demandside response (DSR) schemes.

While it may be impossible to save energy by shutting MCP June 2019

Energy efficiency and the digital landscape Michael Kirkland, managing director of software development and engineering business Forest Rock, discusses the opportunities integrated software management platforms can bring to data centres to maximise uptime, minimise energy costs and benefit from the new business opportunities offered by the Capacity Market down systems in data centres, energy efficiency improvements – and in some cases new revenue streams – can be sought through the way those systems operate.

This is where the Digital Landscape software platform, with its integrated controls technology, comes to the fore to analyse data and to identify inefficiencies and opportunities within the data centre.

The analytics technology can monitor energy and

operational data to identify potential savings and recognise the emergence of faults in critical systems before they occur, helping to protect the critical infrastructure of the data centre.

After the computing power, the largest part of a data centre’s energy consumption is in its ventilation and cooling equipment. Operators need to understand and monitor these systems to ensure they can effectively reduce operating

costs and optimise power usage effectiveness (PUE).

Data centres also need to conform to the ISO14001 and ISO50001 standards. Energy management forms part of the EU Energy Efficiency Directive and ISO14001 can help exempt organisations from other environmental legislation.

Monitoring and managing environmental conditions and maximising energy efficiency is a key requirement of these ISO standards. missioncriticalpower.uk

35

New conduct code to build trust in DSR

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Forest Rock provides data centre operators with Digital Landscape software management platforms to enable them to remotely monitor, manage data centre systems and alert on conditions outside of ideal parameters. The solutions provide real-time monitoring of environmental conditions against Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which could be common across a data centre or can be specific to a particular data hall.

These systems alert operators before SLA conditions have been breached using emails or mobile pushnotifications, with the ability to escalate alerts up the management chain if they are not resolved within the desired timeframe.

The company has developed sophisticated algorithms to manage repeated nuisance alerts from faulty sensors or devices. These algorithms have the intelligence to suppress these nuisance events and can differentiate important missioncriticalpower.uk

root cause conditions, from potentially hundreds of consequential conditions which may be of little interest.

Automated monthly reports of environmental conditions, branch energy consumption, or PUE are generated and emailed to the appropriate person without any human intervention.

The integrated software platforms can both monitor and control all of the electrical and mechanical systems found in most data centres. This helps data centre operators to gain the financial benefits of schemes such as the Capacity Market and Frequency Response while ensuring the core business activities of the data centre are not compromised.

Using the advanced analytical functions within the platform enables data centre operators to move to a more predictive maintenance regime, whereby failures are predicted before they occur, and maintenance can be undertaken more efficiently. l

he Association for Decentralised Energy (ADE) has launched a new compliance scheme that will make it easier for industrial and commercial businesses to participate in the country’s smart energy system.

Flex Assure, the compliance scheme (and Code of Conduct), will help businesses to compare the different services offered by aggregators – the companies that enable businesses to access power flexibility markets. Flex Assure will ensure greater transparency, and give businesses confidence in the services being offered to them and build trust in this rapidly developing market.

The new voluntary membership scheme, which has been welcomed by government, is open to all DSR aggregators and licensed energy suppliers offering DSR services. It sets common standards across the industry, making it easier for industrial and commercial customers to access the revenue these new energy services can provide.

A sixth of the UK’s peak electricity requirement – or 9.8GW – could be provided by businesses being flexible in their energy demand, which could save UK energy consumers £600m by 2020 and £2.3bn by 2035.

John Bryant, director of business development at the ADE, said: “Businesses have the opportunity to benefit from the energy system’s zero carbon transformation, securing new revenue while helping to deliver our low-carbon ambitions.

Flex Assure, going live so soon after the Committee on Climate Change’s Net Zero report, will be an important tool for setting industry-wide standards, supporting businesses as they increase their participation in the demand-side response market, and accommodating more renewable energy to meet our decarbonisation targets at least cost.

“The aggregators who are participating in Flex Assure are highlighting to their customers, and potential customers, that they are committed to meeting the high standards set by the scheme.”

Seven DSR aggregators have so far applied to joined Flex Assure: Centrica Business Solutions, Enel X, ENGIE, Flexitricity, GridBeyond, Kiwi Power and nPower Business Solutions. The scheme will be overseen by an independent committee, which will also adjudicate customer complaints, and provide public notifications if any company is in breach.

Flex Assure is supported by the Major Energy Users Council (MEUC) and Make UK (formerly the EEF). Seamus Nevin, chief economist at Make UK, said: “Make UK welcomes the Flex Assure quality assurance mark for demandside response. Manufacturers are contacted by many different aggregators and are sometimes unable to assess the quality of what they are being offered.

“The Flex Assure DSR code of conduct provides certainty and increases trust in the market.” l June 2019 MCP

36

BATTERY STORAGE

Is battery technology on the verge of a blue period?

A new battery technology has been derived from a widely available pigment which inspired Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’. But could it rival the dominant chemistries currently available on the market? Natron’s Jack Pouchet believes the technology has the potential to transform the data centre sector. Louise Frampton reports

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russian blue is a dark blue pigment derived from ferrous cyanide – a material that has been safely used for over 250 years in paint (leading to Picasso’s famous ‘Blue Period’), blue jeans, and blueprint paper. It is also used in medicine to treat certain types of heavy metal poisoning and in children’s finger paint, where it is considered edible and non-toxic. However, Prussian blue has now found its way into a new application – battery technology.

Natron Energy has developed a new, patented cell technology based on Prussian blue electrodes and a sodium-ion electrolyte. The Prussian Blue electrodes produce a battery with extremely low internal resistance and high round-trip energy efficiency. This makes Natron batteries the ideal platform for stationary energy storage and UPS applications where reliability and highpower are paramount.

Natron Energy was first launched in 2012 as a Stanford spin out by founder and CEO Colin Wessells. Wessells’ PhD work at Stanford focused on identifying safe, high power chemistries that would create new battery products. Natron’s concept from the outset was to design a battery using

Prussian blue has found its way into battery technology materials that are considered safe and highly available as global commodities. The battery technology does not use any rare earth metals and can be produced in high-volume on standard lithium-ion production lines.

“With these advantages, Natron can quickly achieve price parity with lithium-ion technologies and, in the near future will reach price levels of lead acid batteries,” comments Jack Pouchet, vice president of sales for Natron Energy. “Our

early production units have achieved cost targets that have already caught the attention of customers in the UPS, electrical, and telecom OEMs markets.”

We anticipate that many existing lead and even some lithium-ion battery plants will start to be converted over to sodium to take advantage of the improved opex, footprint and improvement to one’s business continuity and risk portfolio MCP June 2019

missioncriticalpower.uk

37 The sodium batteries are reported to offer round-trip energy efficiency of 97% in normal operation and over 98% round-trip efficiency on a coulombic level.

“As we move to larger form factor batteries for highcapacity UPS and EV/Grid applications, we expect to see additional improvements in system-level efficiencies,” says Pouchet.

He explains that this efficiency stems from the extremely low internal resistance within the Natron sodium battery. The Prussian Blue cathode and anode atomic cell structure are effectively large cages that allow ions and electrons to flow in either direction with ease compared with other chemistries.

As a result, the

missioncriticalpower.uk

batteries experience no mechanical stress and generate minimal heat under a wide range of operating conditions.

“Our extended lifecycle testing at 45oC with high rates of charge and discharge (and no rest or settling time between cycles) have demonstrated the Natron battery tolerates abnormal abuse. Natron has built the first battery in which chemistry does not limit battery lifetime,” Pouchet claims.

Natron’s sodium battery is also claimed to be nonflammable and, due to its chemistry, has no thermal runaway conditions.

“It was our intention from day one to design and build a safer, more efficient, reliable battery using chemistry and material science to eliminate the characteristics and thermal runaway associated with lithium-ion batteries in use today. In addition, our sodium chemistry does not use any rare earth elements – like cobalt or tantalum – and, unlike lithium, that uses a large amount of water in the mining and refining processes, our core materials are readily available at

Key features The sodium battery technology is designed to: • Produce high power and fast recharge time • Deliver a long life with up to 100,000 cycles • Sustain energy capacity with minimal degradation under float conditions • Operate safely, even under fault conditions that lead other batteries to combust

significantly lower cost.”

Natron further claims that its sodium battery offers more power (kW) per unit of energy capacity (kWh) rating than lithium-ion or lead-based batteries.

“Our significantly lower internal resistance and high round-trip efficiency enable the sodium battery to excel as a short-term power source.

For bridging to a generator in the two to five-minute range, or providing ramp-rate power like a supercapacitor.

No other battery chemistry is able to provide as much sheer electrical power. Furthermore, Natron’s batteries can do this repeatedly over a similar temperature operating range as lithium-ion, but without costly additional cooling,” says Pouchet.

“For long-term energy supply such as two-hour grid serving applications, the sodium battery performs with significantly higher cycle frequency, recharge rates and no settling or recovery times between charge/discharge cycles. However, we do require a somewhat larger footprint than lithium-ion for a comparable kWh rating as the sodium energy density in these types of applications is less than lithium,” Pouchet continues.

Traditional telco customers have been attracted to Natron’s 1U product, which features high peak power capacity that enables new architectures for redundancy. A typical »

June 2019 MCP

38

BATTERY STORAGE

2N battery design that would be required for either a lead or lithium-ion battery deployment is totally unnecessary with Natron’s sodium battery.

The battery can provide 2X its rated two-minute peak power for 30+ seconds without modifications. The loss of a string does not limit the peak power of the battery system.

“We see applications for use in any mission critical infrastructure where bridging to genset/fuel cell or other energy source is required.

Due to the sodium batteries’ ability to function like a supercapacitor, the battery can be used with prime power fuel cells to provide ride-through for variable ramp-rate loads,” comments Pouchet.

Other ideal applications include mining and industrial applications, where frequent charge/discharge events are considered normal, or in applications where the operating conditions would put tremendous strain on lead or lithium-ion batteries. For off-grid sites such as mines, the sodium battery can be paired with solar, wind or hydro systems to provide long autonomy periods, greatly reducing the demand for stationary generators, fuel deliveries, and generator service/repair cycles. The high peak-power capacity of the sodium battery means that data centre operators can also use their battery plant for grid services such as frequency regulation, demand-side response, or peak shaving to generate additional revenue streams.

“Our ongoing life-cycle testing has demonstrated approximately 18,000 full discharge/charge cycles at a 12C rate with no impact on battery performance. We

The 1U tray platform scales easily within a standard IT rack for increased power

Figure 1: High power

Figure 2: Long life

Max sustained power per energy (W/Wh)

Deep discharge cycle life >100,000

40/1 <10,000 10/1 7/1 Lead acid

<1,000 Li-ion

Natron

fully expect to exceed 50,000 cycles,” comments Pouchet, adding: “We can go from zero to 99% charge in as little as eight minutes. This scenario is highly unlikely in a data centre application as operators will want to keep a minimum reserve on their battery, say 25% of capacity.

“That level would be considered heresy for a lead or lithium-ion battery plant but the sodium battery’s high peak power capacity and ability to delivery extreme amounts of energy over short durations (such as bridging to genset) ensures there will be sufficient reserves available whenever they are called upon,

Lead acid

Li-ion

Natron

regardless of the state of charge.”

Natron is in the process of securing UL certification for its 1U tray and expects to formally launch the product in Q3. The 1U tray platform scales easily within a standard IT rack for increased power. The batteries can be used in applications from 12V to 1,000V DC. “Market interest has been quite high. All of the major data centre owners and operators have expressed an interest. Many have visited Natron’s Santa Clara facility to inspect our manufacturing methods or witness test performance,” comments Pouchet.

He adds that no single chemistry can support the growth rates being seen within the global mission critical markets.

Between data centres, telecom, 5G, EV fast charging, smart cities, transportation, industrial automation, mining, and grid services, there will be requirements for all chemistries – lead, lithiumion, zinc and sodium.

“Over time we expect there will be a net migration to sodium for mission critical stationary power applications.

Especially those where high peak power capacity, cyclecount, ambient operating conditions, life/fire safety, and risk management are concerns.”

Will sodium batteries reach 10% to 20% of the market by 2025? “We would like to think so,” he continues.

So, how could the technology be transformative in the future?

According to Pouchet, the performance characteristics of the chemistry is prompting businesses to consider entirely new uses for their existing and future infrastructure deployments.

“Perhaps one of the most significant, from an environmental and business perspective, is the newfound ability for data centre operators to provide grid stability and grid storage services. The data centre industry is currently around 2% of the electrical grid and expected to be in the 4-5% range within the next five years. We are also rapidly moving to a 100% renewable energy mix for data centres and that move to renewables creates new pressures on the electrical grid,” says Pouchet.

“Data centres and utilities can now develop publicprivate partnerships to leverage these untapped data centre assets to create new revenue streams for the data centre and reduce the need for expensive investments within the public sector.”

He points out that the sodium battery is ideally suited for frequent use: “You can hit the battery repeatedly with varying demand profiles over an extremely wide ambient range without adversely impacting missioncriticalpower.uk

POWER QUALITY

the batteries’ state of health, availability, peak power capacity or life expectancy. These characteristics can be put to use by any industry deploying mission critical infrastructure,” explains Pouchet.

He also predicts that sodium battery technology will accelerate further adoption of, and entirely new uses for, fuel cells (solid oxide and PEM) and renewable energy sources, as the characteristics of the sodium battery are well matched to address bridging, ramping, peak power, and extended ride-through requirements that limit the scope and scale for many of these systems.

“I don’t expect anyone is going to immediately convert 100% of their facilities to sodium batteries. But as they gain experience with the battery and realise they don’t need any service, monitoring, cooling or reserve battery

He claims there will be continuing pressure on the lithium-ion battery market from several fronts.

“The continued global growth of the EV market will see new manufacturing lines become available to keep up with demand. We, at Natron, welcome this, as our battery is also manufactured on these very same production lines.

“However, the EV market will command a premium in terms of volume commitments and force infrastructure markets to either double-down on blanket orders for lithiumion to ensure lead times are within reason (20-26 weeks) and/or pay a premium thereby driving net pricing or margin in the wrong direction.

“A second factor that is looming on the horizon are the total environmental impacts associated with lithium and cobalt. The data centre industry has already faced

You can hit the battery repeatedly with varying demand profiles over an extremely wide ambient range without adversely impacting the batteries state of health, availability, peak power capacity, or life expectancy Jack Pouchet, Natron capacity, mission critical site operators will begin to truly realise the available opex savings,” comments Pouchet.

He anticipates that the technology will become more commonplace, not only for new builds but also with legacy infrastructure refresh and upgrades.

“We anticipate that many existing lead and even some lithium-ion battery plants will start to be converted over to sodium to take advantage of the improved opex, footprint and improvement to one’s business continuity and risk portfolio,” says Pouchet. missioncriticalpower.uk

some difficult headwinds from addressing CO2 emissions and renewable energy reporting requirements. We believe the battery composition, sourcing, and manufacturing processes will be coming under similar scrutiny over time.

“Lastly, in the long run, we believe there will be a bifurcation in the market, with lead and sodium as the preferred stationary power chemistries and lithium-ion will transition to mobile and transport platforms where its energy density provides the most intrinsic value,” he concludes. l

39

Power quality: the ongoing challenge Steve Hughes, managing director of Reo UK, discusses the latest power quality issues and trends.

He highlights the challenges posed by the increasing use of renewable energy

D

espite advancements in renewable energy, electric vehicles and medical technology, these areas face an ongoing challenge with power quality. Variations in voltage and frequency can result in power fluctuations, interruptions and transients that can cause damage to networks.

Renewables will pose challenges One of the most positive news stories in recent years has been the UK’s growing reliance on renewable energy.

While we hope this trend continues, our growing reliance on wind and solar energy poses many issues, not least of all pertaining to power quality.

The nature of wind generation and the process of using stepup transformers means these networks can experience variable loading characteristics and duty cycles of wind power, which can lead to harmonic currents, non-sinusoidal loads, transients and over-voltages.

For renewable energy applications, engineers should consider the use of rugged high frequency (HF) transformers capable of operating across wide frequency ranges.

AI in power quality The use of artificial intelligence continues to become ingrained in all facets of industry, and now it offers some key benefits for

power electronics. Although isolated cases of poor power quality can be rectified where they manifest as damage or downtime, not all aspects of it are obvious or apparent.

This is where automatic power quality characterisation and classification will become an invaluable tool to fight disturbances.

While signal processing techniques have been used for many years to analyse voltage and current issues, AI will take this to the next stage by monitoring the entire network to find patterns in disturbances no matter how fleeting or transitory.

Medical technology Complexity is perhaps one of the biggest issues facing the medical sector. Devices with switch mode power supplies, such as laptop and mobile phone chargers, are increasingly being used in clinical settings.

These are environments where sensitive medical electronics can be extremely susceptible to electromagnetic interference (EMI) propagated through the mains network.

To tackle this issue, Reo UK offers medical isolation transformers that isolate sensitive equipment from the likes of power surges, EMI and overload. The transformers conform to the latest EN IEC 60601-1 third edition international standards. l June 2019 MCP

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ENERGY PROCUREMENT

N

early 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to energy generation and half of this energy is used by industrial or commercial entities. There is increasing pressure on large energy users to improve their green credentials and, in the data centre sector, a number of high-profile colocation providers have set ambitious targets to move to 100% renewable energy.

Interxion, for example, is using 100% renewable energy, mostly wind energy, throughout all three of its data centres in Dublin, and its latest addition in the Irish capital, DUB3, will provide about 2,300 sq m (24,756 sq ft) of equipped space and 5MWof customer power – using only renewable energy.

Recently, Microsoft’s president Brad Smith also announced plans to virtually double its internal

Moving to sustainable energy procurement How can high energy users reduce their impact on the environment, improve efficiency and generate additional sources of revenue? Haven Power’s Marc Bradbrook believes that green energy procurement and onsite generation are part of the solution. Louise Frampton reports carbon fee to $15 per metric tonne on all carbon emissions, to hold its business divisions financially responsible for reducing their carbon emissions. This is in addition to a target of moving to 100% renewable energy for its data centres, with a goal to surpass the 70% target by 2023.

Green energy procurement With more businesses looking for less carbon-intense electricity sources, there are now a host of smaller energy suppliers taking on the ‘big six’, offering all-renewable electricity. Haven Power decided to supply 100% renewable power, at no

additional premium, from January 2018 and is able to deliver this as part of the Drax group – one of the UK’s biggest suppliers of renewable electricity.

According to Marc Bradbrook, commercial director at Haven Power, the ability to provide full traceability to renewable energy sources is becoming a high priority for a wide range of organisations that either have a high public profile or are high energy users.

In addition to data centres, water companies, hospitals and airports are among the mission critical sites that are moving to renewable energy.

Gatwick, for example, has worked with Haven Power to become one of the first airports in the world to go for 100% certified renewable electricity – saving the airport enough carbon to fill Wembley Stadium five times.

MCP June 2019

missioncriticalpower.uk

41 Bradbrook explains that audit evidence is vital to allow its customers to be registered as ‘zero emissions’ under the ‘Green House Gas (GHG) Protocol Scope Two Emissions’ standard.

Demand-side response However, decarbonisation also requires efficient use of energy and Haven Power is working closely with its customers to analyse and improve their energy usage, as well as identifying opportunities to shift load and participate in demand-side response.

“We have seen a change in attitude towards DSR among mission critical sites, such as data centres and hospitals, but it is important that the control remains in the customer’s hands. We can help provide access to the various markets, but also want to ensure that these sites have the transparency to understand exactly what the opportunity is and to maintain control over the risk they want to take,” Bradbrook explains.

Embedded generation and DSR are complex and having access to the relevant expertise can help businesses make the most of the schemes available.

With the right partnership, the rewards for mission critical sites can be significant. Working with Haven Power and demand response aggregator Kiwi Power, Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust reported earnings of about £200,000 per year from power generation and ancillary service revenues.

The trust’s estates department has also reduced expenditure through improved energy management.

Haven Power provides the trust with a daily triad report between November and February, with the extra benefit of within-day updates where necessary. This helps inform the estates department’s energy purchasing decisions and offers an opportunity to minimise or avoid consumption in high-cost periods. At the same time, Kiwi Power has helped the estates department to make the most of the trust’s five generation » missioncriticalpower.uk

Major disruption to UK electricity supplies in the event of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit is unlikely

What will Brexit mean for the UK energy landscape?

If the UK falls out of the Internal Energy Market as a result of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit, major disruption to UK electricity supplies is unlikely, according to Haven Power’s predictions.

The UK only imports around 6.6% of its electricity from the European mainland, using four interconnectors. Haven Power does not operate in the all-Ireland single electricity market. However, it is worth noting that the functioning of the Integrated Single Electricity Market (I-SEM) may come into question in the event of a hard Brexit and the market’s underpinning legal basis falling away. In such a situation, one issue might be how to continue trading power across the interconnectors without a fungible carbon price. (Fungibility is the property of a good or commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of its parts is indistinguishable from another part.)

The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy has announced that “if the UK leaves the EU without a deal, a temporary tariff regime will be implemented. This would apply for up to 12 months while a full consultation, and review on a permanent approach, is undertaken. Under the temporary tariff regime, imports of electrical energy into the UK would be eligible for tariff-free access.”

Given energy’s tariff-free status, the UK is unlikely to see more expensive bills for business customers. Haven Power points out that its customers have the added reassurance that the biomass used at Drax Power Station – owned by the supplier’s parent company, Drax Group – is zero-rated and expected to remain so. In the immediate aftermath of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit, a currency devaluation could make electricity more expensive. Should sterling fall, as some predict, imports of electricity (and its sources, or feedstocks, such as sustainable biomass and natural gas) would become more expensive.

This is because the UK pays in foreign currencies.

Many generators that depend on imported feedstocks have anticipated this potential devaluation and taken precautionary steps. Drax Power Station, which provides approximately 12% of the UK’s total renewable electricity, has contracts in place to ensure its biomass supplies continue well beyond the end of 2019. In addition, Drax cites two key reasons for not expecting Brexit to have an operational impact. Firstly, most of the biomass (about 80% in 2018) comes from North America rather than Europe. Secondly, it has four dedicated port facilities on the UK’s east and west coasts. Conversely, energy suppliers that have not hedged their post-Brexit risks could find it hard to absorb the potential increase in the cost of their raw materials. As a result, these suppliers would probably pass on the cost to customers.

To manage the risk associated with a ‘no-deal’ Brexit, Haven Power recommends energy users fix their electricity contract and/or invest in self-generation and battery storage to reduce their dependence on the Grid. While this option requires some up-front investment, the savings that it could bring – and the security of being more self-reliant – may well make it worthwhile.

June 2019 MCP

42

ENERGY PROCUREMENT

Interest in renewable energy among mission critical sites is set to soar

assets that are spread across the sites. The aggregator designed a bespoke solution that allowed it to control the generators remotely using realtime metering hardware and a combination of existing and new control systems.

“The nature of mission critical sites means they have a very low risk appetite, so we work closely with these businesses to achieve the balance they need between value and risk. We also look at alternative technologies – for example, solar and storage

in behaviour following the Medium Combustion Plant Directive (MCPD), with limited running hours for diesel generation. Customers are almost exclusively reserving generation for triad avoidance.

There have also been changes around the capacity market – in general, the capacity market was a fairly easy entry point into the world of DSR, with a low likelihood of being called upon, with a good return.

A lot of DSR was built on this market… it has been a

Google, Amazon and Ikea.

We are seeing some interest in taking local supply among our portfolio of customers… sustainable, all-day renewable generation is more of a challenge, however. We tend to see university campuses using combined heating and power to obtain all-day generation,” Bradbrook continues.

There are more widespread opportunities around peak independence, he adds, pointing out that the company has been demonstrating this

Gatwick has worked with Haven Power to become one of the first airports in the world to go for 100% certified renewable electricity – saving the airport enough carbon to fill Wembley Stadium five times solutions. The preferred opportunity is around frequency response, for small fluctuations, rather than STOR, as the latter could require a site to provide power for an hour, at a set time, potentially preventing the site from using their back-up assets if needed,” Bradbook continues.

While there are significant opportunities, there has also been some uncertainty within the DSR market over the past 12 months and this requires careful management, according to Bradbrook “We have seen some change MCP June 2019

challenging year for everyone,” he comments.

Going local Bradbrook reports that he has also seen an increase in the number of customers that want to use local power generation.

Having onsite battery storage, combined with solar panels, not only reduces reliance on the grid but can also create an additional revenue stream by selling excess energy back to the grid.

“Those that hit the headlines are usually on the scale of

approach at its own offices.

Haven Power has installed almost 500 sq m of solar panels at its premises at Ransomes Europark, Ipswich, producing enough renewable power in a year to charge an electric vehicle 2,300 times.

“Using a solar/energy storage solution we are able to come off the grid at peak times.”

Getting the basics right Getting the basics right for large energy users and ensuring a good procurement strategy is just as important as creating

revenue streams. Haven Power offers ‘accelerated workshops’, to identify the key business needs of the organisation. By working in partnership with the company’s engineers and analysts, large energy users (consuming more than 10GWh of electricity per year) can design a tailored energy solution that delivers maximum value.

“It is about understanding their business needs. For data centres, hospitals or other mission critical sites, the first priority may be resilience.

We talk to them about where that requirement comes from, evaluate how to optimise and size the technology for their project, and also ensure that they have the basics right,” comments Bradbrook.

He predicts that interest in renewable energy is set to intensify and this will also be fuelled by an uncertain political climate: “As Brexit brings a level of uncertainty to the energy landscape, it is likely to increase consumers’ appetite for increased control over where their supply comes from. If you can contract with, or physically connect with, a solar farm half a mile away from your site, you can have a lot more certainty about where your energy is coming from,” Bradbrook concludes. l missioncriticalpower.uk

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ENERGY EFFICIENCY

A

s society embraces digital transformation, both in our personal and working lives, the knock-on effect has led to staggering growth in the data centre market. While this is all very positive, there is one unfortunate issue that cannot be avoided: the huge increase in the amount of energy needed to power these facilities to ensure they remain operational.

By 2020, global data centre energy use is set to reach about 5% of all consumption, and will be well over 10% by 2050. This could be a ticking time bomb in terms of climate change.

Fortunately, data centre organisations have recognised this issue and new energy reduction solutions are being developed to assist energy reduction. These operators have a number of options to combat the challenges of energy use, all of which require a full understanding of their operational characteristics.

For these initiatives to be a success, engineering expertise is vital in order to assimilate the right information to inform design improvements and drive efficiencies through new technology.

So, what are these new energy reduction solutions?

Firstly, edge computing has a major role to play. The progression of this technology, as well as the adoption of a more decentralised approach to data centres with cellular networks, the extension of campus networks, data centre networks or the cloud, will all be necessary to tackle the latest digital business infrastructure needs. For example, in the future as the sheer amount of data increases, and the speed at which we want to access it accelerates, so will the inadequacy of streaming all this information to a data centre or cloud in order to process it.

Decentralisation is key Right now, data centre businesses are endeavouring to decentralise compute MCP June 2019

Data centre energy usage: a ticking time bomb?

Peter Westwood, data centre director at SPIE UK, warns that data centres will need to tackle energy efficiency and looks at some of the strategies available power and position it as close as possible to where the data is actually generated. As a consequence, this method means that micro-data centres, branch locations and smaller hubs will need to be set up in order to process the data.

The future designed edge ecosystem architectures will result in dramatically improved resiliency and energy efficiency.

The convergence of systems is another tactic data centre companies can use by converging the four essential features of a data centre â&#x20AC;&#x201C; compute, storage, networking and server virtualisation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; into a unified package. The benefits of a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is that it allows closer integration of a greater number of elements

through software.

The trend of converged technologies has been around for a while now, and with the adoption of these types of architectures, organisations have the ability to eradicate the separation of resources, challenges around administration and problems associated with scaling a facility.

In a similar way to their allflash solution counterparts, converged and hyperconverged infrastructure (CI and HCI) are constructed to radically simplify the design of data centres and also help to improve the agility of an organisation. It is important to mention the integrations with next-generation services such as scalable prefabricated solutions and the facilitation

of cloud expansion. Both of these infrastructures can be rapidly deployed and have been designed to make the operation of data centres much easier and quicker to deliver.

Optimisation is another important trend for data centre companies. Organisations can optimise their existing systems by carrying out engineering studies and performance testing and airflow management, all of which assist those who operate data centres achieve higher efficiency and provides a platform for continuous improvement. One strategy taken is to work with modular containment around the main systems to help improve flexibility and resilience.

In planning improvements missioncriticalpower.uk

45 By 2020, global data centre energy use is set to reach about 5% of all consumption, and will be well over 10% by 2050. This could be a ticking time bomb in terms of climate change

airflow management systems are a skill which can greatly assist operational resilience.

In the same way that data centre management tools such as DCIM software have played a crucial role so far, there is a new trend emerging with their integration with things like machine learning, virtual systems and cloud.

This is carried out to utilise management platforms too so that data centre functionality can be dramatically improved.

New cooling technologies The most important means of energy reduction are the latest cooling solutions. Momentum has been growing in the use of new cooling and power considerations. In the past, free or natural air cooling missioncriticalpower.uk

has proved a useful way to improve efficiency (if the data centre is located in an area where a cooler climate serves this need â&#x20AC;&#x201C; such as Nordic regions), rather than operating air-conditioning systems.

Furthermore, the technology behind racks and servers has improved to the point that these machines can operate in temperatures as high as 27°C. However, they still require natural air-cooling systems to deal with any temperatures above that.

As a result of cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) increases in underlying demand, Gartner estimates that ongoing power costs are growing by more than 10% every year, particularly for high-power density servers.

Consequently, liquid-based

cooling is being used more and more, primarily because it is much more efficient than its air-based cooling counterparts.

The knock-on effect this will have on the growth of the global data centre cooling market using liquid-based cooling techniques over the next few years is anticipated to be exponential.

We are already seeing liquid cooling solutions being pre-built into many server and data centre systems, so this trend is very much one to watch.

In addition, data centre microgrid architectures which are energy systems consisting of distributed energy sources (including demand management, storage, and generation) and loads capable of operating in parallel with, or independently from, the main power grid, are also becoming far more common.

Implementing all of these cooling solutions will all contribute to cost savings, emission reduction and reliability enhancement for the data centre community.

Sustainable solutions Renewable energy solutions such as onsite wind generation have also proved an excellent option that many of the bigger data centre operators, including Apple, Facebook and Google have jumped on. All of these organisations have taken the initiatives to power their data centres using wind energy in order to be more sustainable and cost effective.

On top of this, data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) tools and platforms should act as a backbone for making data centre infrastructures energy-efficient and sustainable. These systems merge separate functions, such

as data centre design, systems management functions, asset discovery, capacity planning and energy management to deliver a complete overview of the data centre. This can range from the rack or cabinet level, right across to energy utilisation and the cooling infrastructure.

Open Compute Project Lastly, Open Compute Project technologies have been heralded as another solution.

This technology forces a change to both infrastructure and IT architectures by eliminating centralised capital plant with improved hardware into the IT racks. In turn, this simplifies architectures, enhances efficiency, is quicker to deploy, easier to maintain, and lowers cost.

With all these options available, the industry needs to give serious consideration to the merits of new cooling technologies and evaluate the energy losses encountered in the power train, including its complex equipment and resilience.

The PUE (power utilisation effectiveness) on older facilities can easily reach 2.5, whereas new data centres should be achieving a value of around 1.2 or below.

The broader aspects of energy efficiency, in particular the IT equipment and its arrangement, whether this is containment systems or Open Compute Project solutions, along with the construction and location of the facility, must be carefully considered because they can make a significant difference to the energy consumption of data centres up and down the country. l June 2019 MCP

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DATA CENTRE MANAGEMENT

Deeper insight key to uptime ABB’s Paul Johnson says data centres can increase resilience and tackle spiralling energy costs by focusing on three components: deep component visibility, intelligent grid connections and elastic critical infrastructure.

Louise Frampton reports

W

ith the emergence of Artificial Intelligence in commercial environments and greater dependence on consumer technologies, such as streaming services, e-mobility and 5G, demand for data is growing exponentially. In this hyper connected world, the reliability of data centres is critical. Speaking at Data Centre World, Paul Johnson, Data Centre Segment Lead for ABB in the UK, pointed out that today’s data centre infrastructure requires greater control and deeper insight to manage overall performance and spiralling energy resources.

ABB is focusing on three main pillars to help data centres ensure resilience: intelligent grid connection at the point where the facility interfaces with the utility network; ‘elastic critical infrastructure’ (or flexible solutions to ensure maximum asset utilisation); and deep component visibility to simplify operations and improve reliability.

Intelligent grid connections Johnson highlighted the fact that increasing distributed generation sources, such as wind farms and solar plants, are changing the power generation landscape. This is prompting the need for largescale battery storage to enable energy to be taken from a variety of renewable sources, then fed back to the grid in MCP June 2019

a more controlled manner.

Large energy users are also being urged to help stabilise the grid, through demand-side response (DSR) schemes. Some of the barriers to participation for data centres are now being overcome, according to Johnson: “Data centres were concerned about the possible impact of DSR on site resilience, while the slow adoption of lithium-ion was also a barrier. Slowly, we are seeing more and more adoption of lithium-ion batteries. In the past, there were rumours around fire risks and a significant price differential between traditional lead acid and lithium-ion.

“As lithium-ion has become more developed and more commonplace, we are recognising that the technical issues around fire risk were specific use cases or related to specific types of lithium-ion battery – there are many different categories of chemistry for lithiumion. The price point has also significantly reduced. ABB offers a UPS solution that is lithium-ion ready, which is opening up the possibility for DSR in the future,” Johnson commented.

Microgrid solutions also benefit sites that are looking for reliable power supply, as well as cost and carbon emissions reduction. Microgrids enable resilient power supply even with high penetration of intermittent renewable energy

Deep component visibility allows effective decisionmaking for data centre operators sources like wind and solar.

Digital automation and control systems intelligently coordinate distributed energy resources and loads for the microgrid to function efficiently.

Earlier this year, ABB and Rolls-Royce announced a global partnership on

microgrid technology and advanced automation. This will combine Rolls-Royce’s MTU genset technology and control solutions, with ABB’s modular microgrid solution and control capability. ABB Ability e-mesh can ensure a stable power grid, even with missioncriticalpower.uk

Data centre automation solutions can improve resilience and achieve major energy savings

Deep component visibility is about making devices smarter. At a rack level, current monitoring systems can look at delivery into the data hall and provide granularity of data around power consumption a high share of renewable energy from various sources, working smoothly together with gas or diesel engines. The technology provides power generation asset owners with an integrated, unified view of their distributed energy resources and renewable power generation.

Elastic critical infrastructure “Pay as you grow is about taking a modular approach to missioncriticalpower.uk

electrical infrastructure. It is about being able to right-size the technology blocks – UPS is a key part of the data centre’s electrical infrastructure,” commented Johnson. He pointed out that the DPA range of modular UPS allows ABB to provide scalable power into the data centres power stream.

“Employing a modular UPS ensures the right capacity and level of resilience for your requirements,” he continued, adding that the decentralised

47 parallel architecture of the DPA range “takes all of the critical components and repeats them in every single module for maximum uptime”.

According to Johnson, ABB has made a significant impact on UPS efficiency. Models, such as ABB’s DPA 250 S4 offer efficiencies of 97.6% and 30% lower power losses compared to other similar products on the market. One cabinet can host up to six 50kW modules for 250kW N+1 redundant power, while up to six 250kW frames and up to 30 modules can be paralleled for 1,500kW of uninterrupted, clean power. Secure ring-bus communication also ensures there is no single point of failure in the system.

energy management cloudcomputing platform ABB Ability Electrical Distribution Control System and is claimed to ensure significantly lower power losses.

Other solutions contributing towards ‘deep component visibility’ include ABB’s new asset health solution designed to optimise switchgear performance. Through monitoring and diagnostics of real-time information on the asset health of electrical systems, the ‘Swicom’ solution lowers switchgear maintenance costs by up to 30%.

Condition monitoring increases availability and reliability of a primary and secondary distribution network, helping to identify a possible failure before it

Deep component visibility Johnson explained that deep component visibility is about making devices smarter. At a rack level, for example, current monitoring systems can look at delivery into the data hall and provide granularity of data around power consumption, which can be analysed.

“For some of the larger circuit breakers, we have the ability to look at predictive maintenance. We can analyse the contact wear, for a breaker and predict when it will need replacing. We collect this data via the ABB Ability platform, which allows us to visualise data from our own devices, as well as third party devices. This in turn enables smart decisionmaking,” Johnson commented.

Other examples of intelligent solutions being deployed include ABB’s UniGear Digital, which takes advantage of current and voltage sensors in switchgear, and protection and control relays using IEC 61850 digital communication, to ensure a reliable and efficient electrical network. The solution offers the flexibility to change the loads, supplied by the switchgear, without changing a current instrument transformer.

ABB’s Emax 2 circuit breaker also enables a direct communication to the new

40%

The energy saving achieved by Ericsson by using ABB’s Ability data centre automation solution happens through a predictive approach. As the switchgear condition is visible without having to open the panels, Swicom also increases the safety of personnel.

Real-time data provides better support for decision making, allowing better analysis, optimisation of operations and improvements in power quality.

Operations managers can monitor the condition of their assets via a touch-screen human-machine interface and an intuitive mobile app, while connection with the ABB Ability Asset Health for electrical systems – MyRemoteCare – enables visibility and tracking of assets from anywhere in the world.

Energy savings Increased intelligence and automation within the data centre will not only help to increase resilience but also » June 2019 MCP

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DATA CENTRE MANAGEMENT

The need for intelligent power management will intensify

improve the bottom line for data centre operators. This was recently demonstrated at one of the world’s largest telecommunications network equipment suppliers, Ericsson. ABB enabled the company to automate and control operations not only across hardware and software platforms but also across power, cooling and energy management systems, including the Building Management System (BMS), Power Management System (PMS) and Energy Management System (EMS).

The ABB Ability Data Centre Automation solution helped deliver an impressive 40% in energy savings.

“To reduce energy usage, you need to know what is going on. The ABB Ability platform enables a holistic view and the ability to build repeatable reports. For smaller facilities, a scaleddown version is available in the form of an Electrical Distribution Control System (EDCS) which allows data to be gathered from metering and monitoring devices, and ABB circuit breakers.

These solutions allow the comparison of operational MCP June 2019

parameters between multiple sites – it is all about gaining crucial insights.

“The ABB Ability platform also allows adaptive capacity, which is built into the DPA 500 UPS. As a modular UPS, it is possible to have a fully populated frame but, when indicated, modules can be put into standby mode – thereby reducing power consumption.

Secure Edge Data Centre (SEDC) for industrial and telecommunications environments, which allows customers to run enterprisegrade IT in close proximity to their operational technology (OT) environments, machines and equipment to enable lowlatency, secure and reliable digital processes.

The market for micro-

data acquisition, analytics and control processes near industrial equipment to avoid the latency, security and reliability issues associated with data communication through remote IT systems.

The future In the future, Johnson predicts that the need for intelligent power management will

As liquid cooling has more of an uptake, we are going to see power densities in data centres increase. This will require increased management. Perhaps we will see more in terms of software defined power, or we may see sites with more onsite energy storage and energy generation However, modules can be quickly redeployed when required. This approach significantly reduces losses in the UPS systems.”

Resilience at the edge Johnson revealed that ABB is also focusing on ensuring resilience and optimising infrastructure at the edge, in collaboration with HPE and Rittal. ABB, HPE and Rittal recently unveiled the

modular data centres is growing rapidly. According to 451 Research, the market has seen an annual growth rate faster than 50% on average over the past three years and it will continue to expand with initiatives such as 5G and the ongoing OT-IT convergence.

SEDC provides a turnkey and resilient data centre environment optimised to operate in harsh environments.

It enables customers to run

intensify: “As liquid cooling has more of an uptake, we are going to see power densities in data centres increase.

“This will require increased management. Perhaps we will see more in terms of software defined power, or we may see sites with more onsite energy storage and energy generation.

These facilities may become two-way actors – moving from being consumers to prosumers of energy,” he concluded. l missioncriticalpower.uk

PRODUCTS

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Modular UPS offers high efficiency

Li-ion ready UPS

Schneider Electric has introduced the Galaxy VS, a highly efficient, modular, easy-todeploy, 10-100kW, three-phase uninterruptible power supply (UPS) designed to meet the critical power requirements of IT, commercial and industrial facilities.

With its compact and flexible design, the Galaxy VS addresses the unique requirements of edge computing and small data centres where space and access are at a premium.

The UPS is up to 99% efficient and is available with optional lithium-ion batteries, doubling battery life.

Centiel UK demonstrated its new Li-ion battery solution for the first time at Data Centre World, along with its 4th generation, modular UPS system: CumulusPower.

Centiel UK managing director Mike Elms comments: “Li-ion has been a hot topic for some time now and has been adopted as the norm in other sectors such as electronics and automotive. The UPS industry is now taking notice and starting to see how datacentres can take advantage of its many benefits.”

Centiel believes there will be an inevitable shift towards Li-ion batteries as further cost reductions driven by developments in the automotive industry, flow through to the standby power sectors.

Elms adds: “Incorporating Li-ion will inevitably reduce the size and weight of UPS systems overall and the longer useful working life of Li-ion will mean fewer costly replacements.”

CumulusPower – known for its ‘9 nines’ (99.9999999%) system availability and low total cost of ownership – works with both VRLA and Li-ion. The scalable and flexible modular three-phase UPS system, combines high availability and efficiency, making it ideal for use in small, medium and large data centres.

Other products on show at DCW included the PremiumTower range, which comes in a lower cost, stand-alone cabinet, ranging from 10-120kW.

Christopher Thompson, Schneider Electric’s vice-president, 3 phase line of business, comments: “Our newest UPS strikes the right balance for edge and cloud customers who need innovative solutions that are easy to deploy in this hybrid ecosystem. With its compact, modular design, the Galaxy VS can deploy faster and in a smaller space than traditional UPSs, saving users time and money.”

The Galaxy VS is also EcoStruxure ready. Site managers or technical personnel can remotely monitor their Galaxy VS system status anytime, anywhere with the smartphone app.

New cooling unit reduces energy usage

Rittal has developed a roof-mounted version of its award-winning and highly energy efficient Blue e+ cooling units; these are designed for enclosures of 800 x 600mm (W x D) upwards and deliver a cooling output of 1.3kW. The new roof-mounted units also feature within the new VX25 large enclosure system as an integrated solution.

Roof-mounted climate control units are the top choice in control and switchgear applications where there is a lack of space on the front and side panels.

This could be due to physical location of the enclosures and minimal gangway missioncriticalpower.uk

clearance, but could also be due to an abundance of interlocks, switches or other controls preventing adequate space for a wall-mounted cooling unit.

Air routing within the enclosure is also optimised; the cold air is blown down the front of the enclosure and drawn back up the mounting plate, thereby effectively dissipating the heat from top-mounted components such as frequency inverters.

The new roof-mounted cooling units of the Blue e+ series, like the existing wallmounted units, work with a combination of heat pipe and conventional compressor technology.

Energy consumption is very low because neither a compressor nor a pump is required when the cooling units are operating on the heat pipe; only the fans that circulate the air by the heat exchangers need an electricity supply. This cooling method works particularly well if there is a large temperature difference between the inside of the enclosure and the surroundings. The additional compressor within the cooling units only kicks in when a larger cooling output is required. All the active components operate with speedcontrolled drives so the cooling output always matches what is required, ensuring less energy is consumed.

June 2019 MCP

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Q&A

Simon Binley The Wellcome Sanger Institute’s awardwinning data centre manager discusses the superpower of teleportation, climate change and horology Who would you least like to share a lift with? I think I would struggle to share a lift with anybody who didn’t believe that climate change is a real problem.

You’re God for the day.

What’s the first thing you do? Remove all barriers to the use of renewable energy sources both technologically and financially.

If you could travel back in time to a period in history, what would it be? I’d travel back to just before the big bang and the beginning of the universe to see what happened.

I think it would be fascinating to see how our universe came into being.

Big bang theory: ‘I’d love to see what happened’ Who are you enjoying listening to? I’m currently reviving a lot of the ’80s tracks; it’s quite an eclectic mixtape, involving the Stranglers, Madness, Yazoo and Big Country.

What unsolved mystery would you like the answers to? I would love to know what really sank the Titanic. Was it an iceberg or was it a fire in the coal MCP June 2019

bunker started 10 days prior to departure that sank the Titanic? Was it ice or fire?

What would you take to a desert island? I would take a camera, so that I could get pictures of the fantastic sunsets and some selfies with any islanders that live there.

What’s your favourite book?

I love any books by Ben Aaronovitch, particularly in the Peter Grant series. I think the storylines are fantastic, the characters are well written and it’s all very original.

If you could perpetuate a myth about yourself, what would it be?

If there was one myth I could create and perpetuate, it would be that I’m a good gardener and that any plant that I look at doesn’t immediately die.

What would your super power be and why?

My superpower would be teleportation. Therefore, I would never have to take any low-cost flights anywhere I wanted to go.

What would you do with a million pounds? If I won a million pounds I would buy a house with a pool in Italy and pay upfront for any university fees for my kids.

What’s your greatest extravagance? I have a soft spot for horology, and I have several expensive Swiss watches.

They are a

Simon Binley (far right) collects his award with Marc Garner from Schneider Electric (far left) and Nick Ewing from Efficiency IT (centre) particular passion of mine.

If you were blessed with any talent, what would your dream job be? I wish I was a better photographer. I would love to be a photographer working for National Geographic. I think that would be my dream job.

What is the best piece of advice ever been given?

Don’t ever stop learning and growing as a person.

What irritates you the most in life? When one side of your earphones doesn’t work.

What should energy users be doing to help themselves in the current climate? Given the recent United Nations report on climate change, the catastrophic impact to the planet, and with so little time to make a difference, I think individuals need to take responsibility and understand the effect that we all have in terms of our energy use.

We must take steps ourselves and reduce our consumption.

Additionally, much higher investment needs to be made in renewable technology and

I think individuals need to take responsibility and understand the effect that we all have in terms of our energy use. We must take steps ourselves and reduce our consumption organisations need to bite the bullet and make the investment in new technology when it hits the market.

What’s the best thing – work wise – that you did recently? I recently won the ‘Data Centre Manager of the Year Award’ in the DCS awards 2019. It was a massive honour to win this award; it was part of a big programme of work to become even more energy efficient within the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s data centre.

The programme involved a great team of people from Efficiency IT who helped us implement a new DCIM platform. It has really helped us to manage a very large IT estate within the data centre with a small and dedicated team of people. l missioncriticalpower.uk