MICRO DATA CENTRES
By Alex Emms, Operations
Director, Uninterruptible Power
Supplies Ltd.
www.upspower.co.uk
How micro data centres are
facilitating the IoThings and help
to tackle the challenges it presents
A traditional IT model typically comprised offices full of
people typing on keyboards and generating data – and
those same offices accessing the results yielded from
processing that data. In such circumstances, having a
colocated, large-scale data centre to provide the necessary
IT resource made perfect sense.
Services such as security, environmental control and clean,
uninterrupted electrical supply could be rationalised. The
data centre represented a single entity to be managed, yet
all its equipment, including its environmental conditioning
and UPS systems, could be scaled to meet the high-volume
demands of its office clients.
Impact of the IoT on data centres
The advent and growth of what’s loosely called the Internet
of Things (IoT), however, is profoundly changing this model.
Data generating devices, whether they’re wearable objects,
mobile phones or laptops, or remotely-located items from
vending machines to drones, traffic sensors and telemetry
systems, are spread across a wide geographical area rather
than being concentrated within a single office, or offices.
These are often called Edge devices because of their position
within the IoT network. And transmitting data over great
distances from their remote locations to a large, centralised
data centre doesn’t make technical or economic sense.
The major reason for this relates to the continuing rapid
proliferation of IoT-connected devices; a June 2018 forecast
from Juniper Research estimates that the total number of
IoT sensors and actuators will exceed 50 billion by 2022.
The sharply increasing volume of data being created by this
will tax networks to the limit; the implications for network
availability are a serious concern for any of the devices’
operators.
An alternative and better approach is to split and
distribute the necessary IT resource, providing it as much
smaller, so-called micro data centres located close to the
edge devices in their various remote locations. This brings
other key advantages – particularly improved latency – by
eliminating the data’s long, two-way network journey. Local
users and devices will see a faster, more reliable response to
their input. Data security also becomes easier to manage.
Additionally, smaller data centres can be more flexible and
mobile – an important benefit in an environment where IT
demand can change rapidly.
These data centres, while reduced in size, cannot forego
any of their larger counterparts’ performance. High
availability remains critical, as does good energy efficiency.
Given their dynamic environment, scalability is also
essential. And all of this must be provided within a compact
footprint that includes all necessary security, cooling and
protected power facilities.
It follows that these data centres will require UPS that
are scaled-down, yet also offering the same availability,
energy efficiency, scalability, communications capability
and serviceability as their large-scale equivalents. As micro
data centres can range from a single rack to multiple racks,
with power consumption of up to 20 kW or sometimes
considerably more, both single-phase and three-phase UPS
systems can be relevant.
UPS choices for data centres
Typically, suppliers that offer large-scale UPSs – capable of
delivering solutions of up to 5MW – may also provide various
smaller UPS models, covering both single-phase and three-
phase. Together, these provide a choice of performance,
specifications and power ratings suitable for many diverse
micro data centre designs.
If your requirements allow it, you could opt for a single-
phase solution, configured as a compact tower or 19in
rack-mounted unit. This would provide a cost-effective
single-phase output with common options providing 1
to 10kVA. Larger capacities, or N+n redundancy, can be
achieved by connecting up to four units in parallel. Equally,
availability can be enhanced by ‘hot-swap’ battery design,
which is available through some suppliers and allows battery
changing without interrupting power to the critical load.
Efficiency is typically high, at up to 94% during normal
operation for this type of solution, or 98% if operated in
Eco-mode.
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