Roundup: Teraco, Digital Realty, Isilon Systems

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Teraco Opens Second South Africa Site: Teraco Data Environments has switched on the first phase of its new data center in Johannesburg. The facility near ambo International airport is being billed as a “central node” to new national telecommunications networks. The facility is the second carrier-neutral data center Teraco has built in South Africa, joining the company’s existing Cape Town site. Telehouse has leased space in both data centers, marking its entry into the South Africa market. See TechCentral for additional details.

Digital Realty Competes for Australian Contract: Wholesale data center operator Digtial Realty Trust (DLR) has teamed with Macquarie Capital Group to compete for a contract to consolidate 130 data government data centers in New South Wales in Australia. Other organizations participating in the bidding process include Canberra Data Centres, CSC, Equinix (EQIX), Fujitsu, Global Switch, Oracle and Sun. See Australian IT for additional details.

Emerging UPS Standby Power Sources

Four Promising Alternatives to the Lead Acid Battery. Though an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) performs many important functions, most users value them chiefly for the emergency energy they provide during a power outage. UPSs give IT personnel the time they need to protect sensitive equipment and data from the effects of an electrical service interruption by shutting down systems in an orderly fashion or starting a backup generator. This white paper from Eaton discusses how a viable alternative to the lead acid battery is closer than ever before.

Today, most UPS products use lead acid batteries to store emergency standby power. A proven technology with many decades of successful service in a variety of industrial settings, the lead acid battery remains the most cost-effective energy storage solution as measured by dollars per minute of backup time.

Yet despite these merits, lead acid batteries are unpopular among data center managers due to their size, weight, maintenance requirements, toxic contents and relatively short lifespan, among other issues.

As a result, UPS makers have long been searching for an alternative standby power technology that’s smaller, simpler and “greener” than lead acid batteries, yet no more expensive to operate.

Seven Ways to Extend Power and Cooling in the Data Center

Is your data center running out of power or cooling? This Eaton white paper offer insights on how to extend the sytems you already have and helps you build an optimal plan.

To keep pace with business demands, data centers pack in more power-hungry, heat generating IT systems than ever. Many power and cooling systems are reaching their limits. Older power protection, power distribution and HVAC systems could be bottlenecks to needed expansion. Since these support systems represent 40 percent of the cost of IT equipment, a wholesale upgrade is generally not an option.
So, what is the best way to augment and extend existing capacity within the constraints of tight budgets and limited support staff? How can you establish a power and cooling infrastructure that is ready for growth but not over-provisioned for an uncertain future?
The solution. This white paper offers strategies that enable IT managers to:

Is Your Data Center Draining Your Bottom Line?

Data center energy costs as a percent of total revenue are at an all time high. In fact, energy costs are emerging as the second highest operating cost in the IT organization, behind labor. A typical one-megawatt data center consumes 16 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year—roughly equivalent to the energy consumed by 1400 average U.S. households.

This white paper looks at two key ways that data center managers can improve end­-to-­end energy efficiency: by changing the voltage of power distribution and by taking advantage of new, high-efficiency, multi-mode uninterruptible power systems (UPSs).

Right-Sizing Your Power Infrastructure

This new Eaton white paper explores strategies to optimize energy efficiency in the data center without impeding growth

Data centers today are undergoing unprecedented change, as new technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing, and voice over IP help lower operating cost, conserve floor space and simplify management.

Yet those same technologies are also impacting the data center power chain in significant and varying ways. Some companies, for example, consolidated their servers only to find themselves with more energy and cooling capacity than they need. Others installed hot, high¬ density blade servers only to find themselves with less power than they require.

To compound matters, now is an especially poor time to bear the burdens of an oversized or undersized power infrastructure. With margins tight and energy costs rising, no company can afford to spend more than necessary on its electrical systems. Yet with IT playing a vital role in business success, organizations must also ensure that they have enough clean, reliable power to keep mission¬ critical systems continuously available.

Now more than ever, businesses need a power infrastructure that’s right ¬sized to their precise energy requirements. This white paper discusses the ways in which new technologies are impacting power demand patterns, explores the consequences of having too much power capacity or too little and then provides concrete advice on strategies for right¬sizing your power systems. Click here to download this free white paper for Eaton.

10 Ways to Improve Power System Availability

Once, IT was just another important business resource. Today, IT is the business for many companies. Without it, most organizations would be incapable of serving customers, collaborating with partners, developing new products or performing other basic business functions.

As a result, data center availability has become an essential precondition to competitiveness and profitability. Yet despite their best efforts to achieve “five nines” availability, businesses remain vulnerable to a variety of threats. Chief among them are issues affecting electrical power systems. Data centers rely on a continuous supply of clean electricity. However, anything from a subtle power system design flaw to a failure in the electrical grid can easily bring down even the most modern and sophisticated data center.

Which UPS is Right For the Job?

Traditionally, data center managers and facilities managers could choose from three UPS topologies: standby, line-interactive and double-conversion—offering widely varying levels of efficiency, performance and protection. The latest generation of double-conversion UPSs offers unique multi-mode capabilities. The UPS operates in a very high-efficiency mode unless power conditions warrant a switch to the higher protective level typical of double-conversion mode.

This Eaton white paper describes how various UPS topologies work and looks at the impact of operating mode on five key factors of UPS performance:

• Maintaining voltage within tolerances
• Transferring among modes without locking up IT equipment
• Transitioning gracefully to and from generator power
• Reliability and availability
• Energy efficiency

Data center managers now have viable and remarkably cost-effective new choices with highefficiency, double-conversion, multi-mode UPSs that combine the best of single- and double-conversion topologies: exceptional efficiency plus the high protective level of double-conversion operation.

With best practices and the right choices in equipment, data center managers can reduce energy consumption by nearly 50 percent. That means that almost three-quarters of the power utility bill will fuel actual IT processing, compared to less than 50 percent of the power supplied to a normal data center today. To learn more download this white paper from Eaton.

Eaton Debuts 400V UPS Units

In yesterday’s Higher-Voltage AC as a Power Savings Tool we noted that Emerson Network Power was running 240 volt power to the equipment in its new data center, while APC by Schneider has advocated using 400/230V distribution system.

Today Eaton Corporation announced new configurations of its Eaton 9390 and Eaton 9395 uninterruptible power systems (UPS) using a 400/230V AC power scheme. Eaton said the 400/230V approach, which is widely used in Europe and Asia, proved to be the most efficient approach in its evaluation of alternate power distribution systems.

Eaton’s analysis found the 400V power distribution system provides 80 percent end-to-end efficiency (see diagram above) compared to 76 percent for a North American standard 480V system and a 600V AC system (see a detailed analysis). 

Avoid Obsolescence in Your Power Distribution

Many data centers, including most of those built before 2001, are at risk of outstripping their capacity to power and cool their IT systems. Already, data centers consume 10–30 times more energy per square foot than the typical office building—a figure that has doubled in the last five years. Energy costs represent the single largest component of operating expense, and a potential barrier to future expansion. Does IT really have a handle on this trend?

More regularly and frequently, organizations are hitting fixed limits in their power systems—even systems that were designed and deployed fairly recently. With the volatile rate of change in IT technologies, power demands can quickly exceed established barriers in a legacy distribution system, such as the performance potential of existing amperage/voltage ratings, UPSs, cabling and connectors. The cost of upgrading, augmenting or replacing the power architecture can be astronomical. The costs often could have been minimized or avoided if the power planning process had simply been more forward-looking and holistic in the first place. This white paper describes an approach that considers the major milestones and thresholds in data center power requirements—and how planners should adjust their strategies and recommendations for data centers as they pass through different evolutionary stages. Click here to get this Eaton White Paper