Give It Some Juice: UPSes Meet Data Center Needs

Where stand-alone servers once merely sipped power, today's server rooms are packed with multiprocessor units that, collectively, gulp a lot of juice. Industry watchers refer to the trend as "extreme density" or "power density," where smaller servers are stuffed into racks.

"The servers themselves don't generally take more power, but you can fit so many more in a space, and that space demands much more power," said David Slotten, director of power management at Tripp Lite, Chicago.

An off-the-shelf rack can hold 42 servers, although few companies are so daring as to push those racks to their outer limits. And theoretically, a fully-tricked-out rack can hold 256 blade servers, Slotten said.

"Standing behind some of these racks is like being in a microwave oven," said Brad Phlipot, president of Brenton Technology, a Warwick, R.I.-based solution provider specializing in data center technology, infrastructure design, project management and equipment installation services.

"Four or five years ago, data centers were designed for 500 to 800 watts and three or four servers per rack. Those were very tall, five or six Us high, plus a monitor," said Russell Senesac, product manager of the PowerStruXure line at American Power Conversion, West Kingston, R.I. "Nowadays you can take the same rack and put as many as 10 to 20 servers, or even 42."

But denser, more compact equipment is just one trend in the data center UPS space, Phlipot said. Many companies are also refreshing the electrical infrastructure to take advantage of technology. "We're seeing a lot of end-of-life equipment,legacy systems that are 15 to 20 years old and taking up a lot of usable floor space, power and cooling," Phlipot said. "Customers today want scalable infrastructure that's cheaper to maintain and operate."

They also want higher availability, said Bill Campbell, director of power product management at Columbus, Ohio-based Liebert's power business group.

"What's really going on in any data-processing facility is that the criticality is going up," Campbell said. "[Data center operators want more out of a room. All of this activity,more computer power, more criticality,in the same square footage is requiring upgrades of the overall facilities."

Liebert, which has traditionally worked with high-end consulting engineers and design-and-build firms, is now piloting a channel program that helps solution providers working on smaller data centers move from a single phase, or "outlet power," infrastructure to more advanced, three-phase installations.

"Server rooms are increasingly crossing the boundary from single-phase to three-phase, and VARs are facing these problems," said Kevin Stoll, vice president of marketing at Liebert. "VARs are moving upward in power needs."

The program puts UPSes and related equipment into presized and pre-engineered bundles, eliminating more complex designs. About 100 solution providers are in the program, and Liebert expects to launch it nationwide this fall, said Stoll.

APC is taking a similar approach with its new PowerStruXure line, modular UPS systems that are presized and pre-engineered and designed not to require costly raised floors. As a company's power needs expand, another PowerStruXure unit can be latched onto the existing infrastructure.

"Our marriage is in the IT environment, and this modular approach makes it very simple with spare parts in the box and user serviceability," Senesac said.

Tripp Lite is addressing the server consolidation trend with more attention to adding remote management features to UPSes and "future-proofing" them with USB and serial ports, Slotten said. The company is also making a line of UPSes that are "transformable" from tower to rack.

Phlipot said today's UPS designs reduce the overbuilding and overcapacity seen in past installations and avoid the deployment of impractical setups, such as those where power cables are run 30 floors down to a basement maintenance room.

"It's great to be able to just bring the UPS up in an elevator and run it locally. You can start at, say, 10 kilowatts and grow from there," Phlipot said. "It's kind of tough to fit a legacy UPS through the side of a 30-story skyscraper."