7x24 Magazine 2015 Spring_6fx

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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.
John Peter Valiulis is the Vice President Marketing, Thermal Management at Emerson Network Power.
He can be reached at
David Sonner is the Vice President Marketing, Liebert AC Power at Emerson Network Power. He can be reached at