UPSs for data centres - optimising availability and power demand

A recent Gartners survey showed that 60% of data centres' budgets are consumed by delivering power and expelling heat. This large component is growing in line with continuously expanding demand for nonstop 24 hour IT services. Corporations are facing a dilemma as they try to balance their provision for this demand against government pressure to minimise their environmental impact.

Opportunities for minimising carbon footprint lie in improving UPS efficiency. UPS Ltd's PowerWAVE 9000DPA series is uniquely positioned to facilitate this, because they are designed for the most demanding data centre applications and they can be matched closely to their load for maximum operational efficiency.

Data centre standards have been established by The Uptime Institute, which has defined four 'Performance Standard' tiers for sites and their UPS infrastructures, reflecting levels of resilience and availability. Operations such as e-commerce or financial settlement systems that cannot tolerate any downtime must have a Tier lV site, whereas activities such as service centres where short periods of limited service are acceptable can run within a Tier lll site.

The only UPS topology that merits Tier lV ranking is the Decentralised Parallel Architecture (DPA) design implemented by the PowerWAVE9000DPA, which offers total redundancy and the highest level of availability.

The PowerWAVE 9000DPA features 'true' on-line double-conversion which is the only way to protect loads against the primary AC problems posing the greatest threats to data centres. Further benefits include high double-conversion efficiency, near unity input power factor, low input THD and blade server support.

However the PowerWAVE9000DPA UPS other major benefit arises from the hot swap modular design. This allows the UPS configuration to be 'rightsized', continually matching the critical load as it changes to meet consumer demand. Running a UPS at nearly full load maximises its operating efficiency, significantly reducing demand for power and for air conditioning. There is huge potential for this efficiency improvement, because surveys have shown that Tier lV systems have a median load value of just 30 to 40%.