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47

20 percent, efficiency begins to drop.

In a legacy data center with 45-50

percent utilization, efficiency is about

83-86 percent at 100 percent load

after accounting for losses from low

utilization rates.

Instead of dual-bus, some enterprise

data centers and most colocation

data centers today employ “reserve”

power system architectures, which

offer comparable availability, greater

efficiency and scalability, and higher

resource utilization at lower overall

cost than dual-bus architectures. A

reserve architecture creates a

redundant system architecture and

can be designed with downstream

power distribution similar to a dual-

bus architecture. This allows the UPS

to operate at higher utilization rates

while providing a highly fault tolerant

design. Switching to a reserve

architecture can raise UPS system

utilization to approximately 75

percent, and Emerson Network Power

has experience with some reserve

architectures that achieve better than

85 percent utilization.

CONSIDER TAKING A NEW

PATH TO GROWTH

Overcoming the long-standing

practice of over-provisioning is an

important strategy for reducing

capital expenditures, but if you don’t

have capacity sitting idle, how is

growth managed? Having a scalable

power system allows you to purchase

and rapidly deploy assets based on

predicted growth, conserving capital

until real business growth spurs

expansion. Today a variety of paths to

a scalable power infrastructure can be

taken.

Besides improving asset utilization

and efficiency, reserve architectures

also make it easy to grow simply and

rapidly, which is why they are

common in colocation facilities that

need to increase capacity quickly

when new customers are added.

Reserve architectures allow data

center managers to scale up smoothly

as needed. With an architecture of

single buses (N+1 or N+2), the

simplest path is to standardize to a

rapid deployment of that exact bus.

Growth is then an easy process of

repeating that deployment.

At the equipment level, having

capacity-on-demand is an effective

way to prepare for future growth.

Technologies are available that

enable capacity increases without

additional footprint requirements —

either through unlocking capacity via

software, or by adding internal

capacity modules within a UPS

cabinet. Both approaches reduce

initial capital expenditures.

A scalable power infrastructure can

also be built knowing that in the

future more physical modules will be

added—for example, if future

capacity requirements are unclear and

if the data center can operate on a

simpler and somewhat less reliable

1+N architecture. Today’s 1+N UPS

designs allow a data center manager

to purchase very simple switchgear

and only one UPS module, and when

more capacity is needed, another

module can be purchased and

installed without the additional

expense and deployment time

associated with system-level controls.

By modernizing the power

infrastructure, data center managers

can better manage costs by

improving efficiency and initial capital

expenditures. Deploying a modern,

efficient, scalable power infrastructure

can save tens of thousands to

hundreds of thousands of dollars,

improve performance and provide an

easier path for growth.

MODERNIZATION:

YES OR NO?

A good first step toward making this

decision is to assess your

infrastructure equipment to

understand its operating efficiency.

With this information in hand, you can

determine annual operating expenses

and compare them to the potential

savings from modernizing your data

center. A number of tools are

available that will help you assess

your existing equipment and compare

it to more modern approaches in

order to justify your savings. Once

you understand your ROI, you will be

able to make good business decisions

about deploying a cost-effective,

resilient and highly available IT

infrastructure.

Taking advantage of the

modernization opportunities

discussed in this article may also

prove to be the most cost effective

approach to enabling growth and

accommodating demands for

additional capacity. Many data

centers are capacity constrained by

their technology. New technologies

can support greater computing

capacity, which may delay or

eliminate the need to build new

facilities or outsource computing.

New technologies also provide

insight into data center operations

that can be used to maintain

availability and improve planning.

WWW.7X24EXCHANGE.ORG

John Peter Valiulis is the Vice President Marketing, Thermal Management at Emerson Network Power.

He can be reached at

JP.Valiulis@emerson.com

David Sonner is the Vice President Marketing, Liebert AC Power at Emerson Network Power. He can be reached at

David.Sonner@emerson.com