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Power Quality in Internet Data Centers

Submitted by Hans De Keulenaer on Mon, 2008-01-07 16:06.

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By Mark Stephens, EPRI

The building of Internet data centers (IDCs) is a growing industry that is pushing the limits of electric power and reliability requirements. As utilities must decide whether it is worth the cost to build new infrastructure to keep up with the present demand, facility operators are looking at power distribution designs that will improve efficiency and allow them to continue to expand their operations.

To meet customer expectations of “five nines” — or 99.999% — availability, IDC designers must improve power quality, reliability, and efficiency. In this quest, redundancy in the system becomes absolutely necessary, but also important are power quality issues such as mitigation of voltage fluctuations and harmonics and good techniques for grounding.

This PQ TechWatch provides information about the types of data centers being built and their design, along with new standards and certification processes that are being developed. Detailed descriptions are provided of power quality considerations and possible solutions. Grounding is given its own section, where electrical standards for safe and effective grounding are discussed and examples provided.


The "five nines"

Submitted by Jonathan Manson on Mon, 2008-01-07 17:42.

Is the so-called "six nines" not appropriate for the really high availability required by power critical users such as IDCs? If "5 nines" allows for 5.3 minutes down time per year then "6 nines" reduces this to 31.5 seconds pa.

This is a pdf link that presents this argument.

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Power Quality in Internet Data Centers

Submitted by David Chapman on Tue, 2008-01-08 12:31.

Tier 3 - 99.98% - is roughly equivalent to a standard domestic electricity supply in western Europe.

Most equipment suppliers in UK are talking in terms of at least 6 nines and better.

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Is redundancy worth the investment?

Submitted by vinayjohn on Mon, 2008-02-04 20:29.

For a mission-critical IDC or standalone data centre, the cost of downtime is over $50,000 per hour.

Making an investment in redundancy depends on the nature of the business, the parameters of the investment, customers, users and infrastructure (assets & people). Dealing with different cultures and attitudes of users & customers is the tough part which, in extreme cases, can lead to legal disputes.

Not 99.9999% availability but "No Downtime" should be the objective. Avalability should be beyond Tier IV requirements for the whole infrastructure, not just for one sector say, power infrastructure.

So for the whole mission-critical infrastructure, advanced redundancy architectures with green technologies are required to cut down operational costs.

(edited by admin)

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