Centiel Electrical Review - Spotlight

COMPANY SPOTLIGHT

Centiel: In pursuit of technical excellence Centiel is an innovative, high-quality UPS manufacturer with a long heritage.

The innovators behind the company were pioneers of the industry, previously developing the first three-phase transformerless UPS and the first threephase modular UPS solutions. Here, David Bond, chairman, Centiel UK, gives us an insight into the company’s history, its vision and how it is helping drive UPS innovation through technical excellence.

A quick history lesson Filippo Marbach, founder, CEO and chairman of the board of Centiel, was the COO of Newave and led the research and development team that introduced many of the innovations that revolutionised the UPS industry. Shortly after ABB acquired Newave, Filippo left the company and set up Centiel with Newave’s head of R&D, Gerardo Lecuona, to continue to push the boundaries of UPS product development and pursue technical excellence for the next generation.

The new Swiss-based Centiel team focused on developing new technologies that further improved both system availability and operating efficiency. The result was a brand-new UPS solution, CumulusPower, the fourth generation of a truly modular UPS solution, known for its 99.9999999% (nine-nines) availability, high levels of efficiency and low total cost of ownership (TCO). CumulusPower achieved this by enhancing Decentrailised Parallel Architecture to create Distributed Active-Redundant Architecture (DARA), which further increased system intelligence and resilience, and thereby system availability.

CumulusPower is unique because of its ability to deliver a combination of class-leading availability, and efficiency in a reduced footprint. Furthermore, CumulusPower was developed using highly flexible frame sizes and module ratings enabling facilities to ‘pay as they grow’. Indeed, CumulusPower modules are so robust they can even be re-deployed as necessary if an organisation moves or requires a module at a different location.

System availability is further increased by Centiel’s Triple Mode communications bus, a patented technology which increases system availability even further by increasing the speed and resilience of the system’s internal communication infrastructure. It’s just another example of where we have worked to remove single points of failure to increase availability even further and provide a very high quality solution.

It was clear that a premium UPS solution needed premium quality support. With the UK offering the largest UPS market in Europe, the brand acquired a small service-based company in the UK to give it the instant ability to both sell and support Centiel products.

Centiel was fortunate because people knew the innovators behind the brand and wanted access to the latest UPS technologies. The phone quickly started to ring and within three years Centiel had established a UK subsidiary, a subsidiary in Singapore covering the Asia Pacific market and had more than 50 channel partners across the world. Our aim is to add four to five channel partners in strategic locations each year, eventually having 100 channel partners in all the key markets across the globe.

CumulusPower has now been installed in data centres and comms rooms in over 60 countries across five continents. Hundreds of megawatts of critical power loads are now protected with CumulusPower in locations including the UK, Singapore, Australia, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic and the Channel Islands.

To manage the demand, since start-up, the Centiel factory in Lugano, Switzerland, has more than doubled in size with the capability of doubling in size again in the near future as the company continues to grow.

The Centiel vision Our vision as an organisation is to eliminate all power quality problems.

The power generating companies do a great job in producing good quality power, but this power will never be perfect by the time it reaches the end-user, because of random events such as spikes caused by lightning strikes and harmonic distortion caused by other power users.

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COMPANY SPOTLIGHT

Currently, we are marketing our fourth-generation solution but, as innovators, our research and development team is working behind the scenes and developing our next generation of UPS, so watch this space.

Our elevator pitch would be, ‘to minimise the risk of power protection problems, we supply UPS systems of the highest availability possible, which are flexible enough to do the specific job required, and agile enough to evolve as a business develops for the lowest cost possible’. I’m not talking about the purchase price here, but TCO, where increased efficiency, reliable quality components and the ability to constantly rightsize the system minimises whole life costs for Centiel’s end-users.

The perfect UPS? 30 years ago, I was asked to write an article about the perfect UPS. At the time I allowed my imagination to run riot and said, ‘the perfect UPS never fails, is 100% efficient, takes up no space, presents a perfect load to the mains and costs nothing to purchase.’ Back then a typical 30kVA (24kW) UPS was 85% efficient, cost £30,000, was the size of a wardrobe and weighed ¾ tonne.

Now for a few thousand pounds the same rating of UPS can be picked up with one hand and is more than 97% efficient. Over the years we have got much closer to the perfect UPS, however, in the future, we will go smaller and lighter with an even higher power density. Imagine a 600kW UPS the size of a desktop printer? We are a long way off that yet, but one day it may be possible if we keep pushing the boundaries and innovating.

Centiel is focused on driving technology forwards. Our honest, experienced approach is trusted by organisations around the world to protect their critical power. It’s an approach which is already proving popular, and we aim to be pursuing technical excellence for many more years to come.

At home, if the lights flicker or go out it’s not a very big deal, however, in a typical data centre the value of the IT equipment and the data it is processing is often incalculable. In addition to costly IT servers, the delicate equipment used in medical facilities and laboratories, for example, need perfect power all the time, which is why very high-quality UPS solutions are needed.

Why would you install a cheap UPS using inferior components with a higher risk of failure in these critical environments? The answer is you wouldn’t.

It is for this reason that many facilities are increasingly appreciating the need to move to a higher quality UPS solution to protect their critical power. This is where Centiel comes in. Centiel’s global sales are growing very strongly, whilst sales in the UK doubled last year and will more than double again this year, despite the challenges that come with launching a new brand.

The majority of our customers are data centres and IT facilities, but we also supply to the healthcare, the banking and finance world, amongst others. In reality, almost every company needs a UPS, as they almost all have some form of IT infrastructure. Tiny companies with small servers and a few terminals need a small, cost-effective UPS. Companies with a network room/micro data centre through to huge data halls of the biggest data centres in the world all need Centiel UPS products.

With businesses moving towards a more agile approach to work life balance, more staff are now working remotely. All needing technology-based communication methods, which will create more data that needs to be processed and stored. Furthermore, the continued growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G will result in even more data and so our market is certain to grow in the future.

Customer story Centiel UK joined forces with electrical sub-contractor Seahorse Services Ltd to complete the installation of a new UPS to protect the power to a central London venue. Located close to Covent Garden, the entertainment space is within an historical building used for dining, parties and drinks receptions, as well as meetings and conferences for up to 1,000 delegates.

An outdated legacy UPS was replaced with one of Centiel’s top cable entry frames, fitted with 5 x 50 kW modules (200 N+1), along with 80 batteries now providing a 10 minute run time. This allows the switch over to a generator to ensure power is protected to the venue at all times.

Louis McGarry, sales and marketing director at Centiel UK commented, “Seahorse managed the full design and build, working with the main contractor and the client. This included UPS, switchgear, lighting, flooring, ceiling, fire dampers, battery build, DC build, cable trays and all the cabling, which included 100 metres from the plant room’s switch gear to the generator, which was located externally.

“Due to the small size of the plant room, it was important for us to utilise every inch of space, and so CumulusPower, with its top cable entry option, was chosen. The flexible, modular configuration of CumulusPower allows the inclusion of an input terminal to accept cables from above via steel wire armoured (SWA). It offered the perfect solution for the small plant room. The project was completed from strip out to commissioning of the UPS in 15 weeks.”

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