MODERN MODULAR UPS MAKE RIGHTSIZING EASY FOR DATA CENTRE OPERATORS

Until the 1970s our society had a ‘make-do-andmend” culture, where things were made to last and repairs were the norm, explains

David Bond, Chairman, Centiel UK

The advent of “just in time”, high volume production lines allowed products to be made quickly and cheaply, where low production costs were prioritised and the “throw away” culture we now have - where it is cheaper to buy new than it is to repair - arrived.

The result of this well-meaning but, in hindsight, misguided culture is vast landfill sites and oceans full of plastics and potentially harmful chemicals. It’s wrong on so many levels, but there is hope and I do believe changes lie ahead.

Twenty years ago, no-one was talking about sustainability. Now it’s a subject that is being discussed in many board rooms around the world.

Sustainability may just be a tick box exercise for some large corporations currently, but this is changing. Young people, who are the ones who will suffer the consequences of the current culture, increasingly drive the agenda and people realise the earth’s resources are indeed, finite.

Of course, there are challenges with renewable energy and nuclear. There are no easy answers, but we must cultivate our own back yard. While today’s decision makers may not personally benefit from any changes we implement now, our children and grandchildren will. After all, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.

Young people are certainly conscious of the need for change, and they need to be as they share some responsibility for the problem. For example: millennials are heavily invested in mobile data, social media and online shopping and therefore drive the need for huge data centres such as those of Amazon and Facebook, which in turn burn massive amounts of energy and use huge volumes of water.

Reducing consumption

Within the data centre there are a variety of culprits burning electricity. For example: the load itself, environmental controls (air conditioning) and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS).

However, how these systems are managed can have a significant impact on their operational efficiency.

For example, if UPS and batteries are located together, more airconditioning is needed because while a UPS can happily operate in an ambient temperature of 400°C the VRLA batteries must be kept at around 200°C to optimise their useful working life.

Locating the batteries away from any heat source in a well-ventilated environment will reduce or even negate the need for any cooling.

If it is not possible to separate the batteries from the UPS physically, consideration could be given to using Li-ion (actually LiFePO4) batteries which will happily operate at higher ambient temperatures.

Rightsize for operational efficiency and availability

Before the arrival of modular UPS, data centre operators increased the resilience, or availability, of their data centre by connecting their UPS in “parallel redundant”, or “N+n”, configurations where “N” was the number of UPS needed to support the load and “n” was the additional number of UPS required to provide the redundancy.

The problem back then was that large UPS had to be paralleled, forcing the UPS to operate at a low point on its efficiency curve which wasted a lot of expensive energy that, in turn, created excessive heat that needed to be cooled by air conditioning - which is expensive.

Modern modular UPS make rightsizing easy for data centre operators. They can now install large, but empty,

UPS cabinets and only install enough smaller UPS modules in the cabinet to support the load, “N”, and provide the required redundancy, “n”.

By using smaller UPS modules, the UPS can be sized to operate at an optimum point on its efficiency curve, saving considerable OPEX in terms of both operational efficiency and ongoing maintenance costs. CAPEX is also saved as the datacentre operator only needs to buy the UPS capacity they need.

Availability is also maximised by using modular UPS as the mean time to repair for a UPS module is less than 5 minutes (the UPS module is “swapped out”) whereas for a non-modular UPS is c.6 hours. Class leading modular UPS now provide “9-nines” (99.9999999%) availability.

Solving Challenges

Centiel’s team have long been at the forefront of solving such technology challenges. Centiel considers itself to be a technology company that happens to make uninterruptable power supplies.

In the late 1980s I wrote a paper imagining the perfect UPS. I said it would be 100% efficient (we are now close to 98%), it would offer 100% availability (we are now at 99.9999999%), it would be recyclable and last forever.

The development team behind Centiel, who created the first transformerless UPS and the first three phase modular UPS, have pretty much solved the first two challenges to create the (almost) perfect UPS, and for the past four years they have been innovating to develop a UPS with a design life to match the design life of a data centre (typically 30 years) and can be recycled to make UPS more sustainable.

It’s easy to ‘greenwash’ where organisations pretend they are looking seriously at sustainability so let’s look in more detail what this actually means for UPS and power protection beyond simply saving energy, and how sustainability can be genuinely achieved within datacentres.

A typical datacentre is designed with a 25-30 year design life in mind. Most leases on buildings are 2530 years to reflect this. The electrical infrastructure including cabling, generators and switch gear etc. are all designed and installed to last the 25-30 years.

The equipment downstream of the UPS: the IT or the medical equipment for example, is however, typically replaced every three to four years, usually with smaller more powerful kit, meaning that the load will almost certainly change every three to four years.

The challenge is to build an infrastructure for what will be needed in 20 to 25 years’ time when no one really knows what that future will look like.

Until recently, UPS had design lives of ten to 15 years (some manufacturers refuse to support their UPS on “fully comprehensive” maintenance contracts when the UPS is more than 10 years old).

This means that the entire UPS system will need to be replace at least once, but often twice, in the data centre’s operational life, causing significant disruption and risk to the datacentre.

Of course, UPS manufacturers like the idea of customers having to purchase new UPS every ten years. It keeps their production lines busy. But what about data centre operation and sustainability?

A different vision

Locations of batteries, modular UPS and rightsizing will help up to a point, but to really work towards solving the sustainability issue we need a radically different approach.

So how would it be if I painted a vision where manufacturers worked towards a totally different business model where instead of making money from selling more, they profit from properly maintaining and repairing kit?

Electrical and electronic components do fail, so UPS systems should receive regular preventative maintenance and be built with components that can be replaced.

This model would benefit clients because they would save on the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their UPS, and it would benefit future generations as it offers a more sustainable solution.

For manufacturers, the lifetime value of the client would be far longer and higher and would negate the risk of the client buying the replacement from a different supplier.

UPS will still require firmware updates, ongoing maintenance and upgrades so the manufacturer then becomes a trusted advisor and part of the data centre’s power protection department rather than an arm’s length transactional supplier.

For example, say an IT upgrade is required and certain file servers need to be swapped in or out.

The manufacturer would work closely with the data centre and advise them if they need to remove or add a couple of UPS modules.

The relationship moves away from being transactional to one of a mutually beneficial partnership where service and support becomes an ongoing discussion.

The outcome is that it’s as much in UPS manufacturer’s interest to keep the datacentre running as it is for the data centre manager!

The UPS continually generates data about the supply, power usage and its environment and this needs to be taken advantage of too. Live real-time information can be used to make tweaks and changes. For example, has the load profile changed over time?

Does the load fluctuate on a regular basis? How old are the systems and what efficiency levels are they running at? The data provided by the UPS is essential for decision-making.

UPS manufacturers can help by working closely with data centres and assisting them in planning how to maximise efficiency and therefore become more sustainable.

We have just launched a UPS, which nents,

Will Have A Much Longer Design

Instead of replacing capacitors every four years, they will need replacing just once, after c.15 years, for their entire 30 year design life. Quality components cost more but we are talking just tens of pounds per module.

To replace the entire UPS system every ten or so years will cost tens of thousands of pounds. Combined with Centiel’s approach to act as trusted advisors, it means we can help organisations take steps to move away from a “throw away” culture with a genuinely sustainable offering.

Hope for the future

In 2017 the Swedish Government introduced tax breaks for people and organisations that repair rather than replace equipment.

In 2021, the UK Government brought in “right to repair” laws which require manufacturers to make spare parts available to people buying white goods, with the aim of extending the lifespan of products by up to ten years to benefit the environment.

Governments are acting and young people are pushing for change, so a cultural shift to sustainability is starting to happen. It’s not being driven by the cost-of-living crisis but an awareness of our finite resources. However, rising energy costs are serving to accelerate the change.

As manufacturers, Centiel’s team has historically led the way in the UPS industry. We are now leading the shift towards sustainability and hope others will join us.

www.centiel.co.uk