UNINTERRUPTIBLE POWER SUPPLIES
Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) are a vital component
of any organisation’s business continuity strategy, providing
battery-based backup should the service from the mains
become disrupted.
The essential requirements of a UPS are that it’s reliable,
easy to maintain, efficient to operate and unobtrusive –
one wants to know that it’s there, but would prefer that it
never be needed. They should be designed with simplicity
in mind, ensuring such aspects as installation, monitoring,
management and scalability are made simple for the user.
Increasingly, given the high levels of automation and
remote management in today’s data centres, UPS must
have IoT enabled capabilities to ensure their status can be
monitored, and where possible their operation be controlled,
from outside the white space. Furthermore, any maintenance
must be performed as quickly and easily as possible, with
minimum downtime.
Many new systems will accommodate all of these
requirements, regardless of the choice to deploy them within
the largest data centres or edge facilities. One thing, however,
is clear, that backup power is essential to today’s requirement
for business continuity.
Installation and start-up
The first place to begin in any UPS installation is with
the start-up configuration. This might include the size of
the solution required and whether it should be single or
three-phase. Another consideration might be the speed
of deployment and any sizing constraints to the area in
which the UPS will be deployed. In terms of energy usage
and predictability, it may need the capability to perform
prerequisites such as an Easy Loop test, which will allow the
performance to be verified well in advance of connecting the
load. Finally, if the application requires a modular, scalable
approach, will it need additional batteries and will those need
to be configured internally or externally?
Marc Garner, Vice President, IT
Division, Schneider Electric UK
www.schneider-electric.co.uk
IoT enabled UPS systems ensure
their status can be monitored and
are critical for business continuity
Expansion, resilience & scalability
Another key consideration for continuity might be plans to
accommodate future growth. Here one might consider how to
arrange the UPS configuration in order to provide increased
capacity, ensuring that resilience, or uptime, is of the highest
priority. For high levels of availability, a UPS may need to be
deployed in a parallel, N+1 or distributed redundant design, so
that the failure of anyone can be accommodated without risk
to total loss of power within the configuration.
If requirements for future expansion are critical, one might
also consider the use of data centre reference designs to plan
and configure power systems in a way that can serve growth.
This will not only enable users to select and test potential
configurations but also provides them with the reassurance
that the architecture will indeed work as planned.
Maintenance & battery considerations
With the blame for many outages often lying with human
error, maintenance is another aspect that has to be
considered as part of any business continuity plan. To avoid
downtime, it is recommended that a UPS be easily accessible
from the front, which will simplify servicing throughout its
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