Power Play
College builds flexible data center
Uninterruptible power supply fits
into small space and provides for expansion.
by Chris Loeffler
A college in New England, needing to plan
for the future, anticipated growth in the
coming years and wanted to have a data
center that could expand to accommodate its
increasing power needs. The sciences
division of the college is comprised of five
buildings that house the sciences,
mathematics and engineering classrooms and
labs.
This area is supported by its own data
center, separate from central IT. The
college’s technical staff manages about 600
computers, 15 servers and a growing number
of clusters for scientific computing.
The college’s data center houses servers
that support a wide range of academic
applications, from administration and
chemical safety to teaching general Web
technologies, and supports 12 computer
classrooms and lab environments. Scientific
research applications and data in
bioinformatics, cosmology, computational
chemistry and various disciplines reside
within this structure.
As the college continues to grow, its
power needs have increased, as well. Without
room to build another data center, the
college chose to renovate the existing
space. With dimensions of only 11 feet by 33
feet, the racks of equipment were tightly
configured into narrow aisles, making
routine moves, adds or changes difficult.
The IT staff wanted to allow for about 10
years worth of growth, which was a challenge
due to the space limitations.
In addition to accommodating future
growth, the IT staff sought to develop
strategies around power management and power
quality. A string of power outages, which
lasted for several hours at a time, had
caused critical equipment to fail after
power generators did not start. This
experience, coupled with equipment
overheating in the data center, caused the
IT manager to consider new power-protection
solutions.
The college’s IT staff had several
requirements when searching for an
uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to outfit
its data center, including a
power-protection solution that would
accommodate the small space, address power
and cooling concerns, and allow enough
flexibility to support future expansion.
The IT manager chose a modular,
three-phase UPS designed and optimized for
high-density computing environments. The UPS
does not require a dedicated cabinet;
therefore, more space is available for IT
equipment. The UPS also does not add to the
heat load, helping to keep energy costs
down.
The college implemented three new UPS
units (12 kW each) and three extended
battery modules. The UPS units were
configured as a single module with the
option to expand capacity by removing the
battery modules and adding additional 12 kW
systems, as needed.
While renovating the space, the IT
manager set up a temporary data center and
essentially rebuilt the infrastructure to
improve all components. The data center was
configured to use a remote power panel to
dedicate two branch circuits to each rack;
one circuit feeds power distribution on the
left side of the rack and one feeds power on
the right.
Each server is equipped with dual power
supplies, connecting each power supply to a
different branch circuit and ensuring
another level of redundancy.
Chris Loeffler
While the UPS can provide up to 20
minutes of uptime during a power
disturbance, the generator is programmed to
turn on after five minutes as an added layer
of reliability. The UPS unit’s
plug-and-power connections and hot-swappable
batteries and electronics modules simplified
the installation.
The UPS has given this college’s data
center greater reliability and flexibility
to meet its growing power demands. The
modular design enabled the college to face
the space restrictions of its data center
and deploy the backup protection for its
current needs, with the flexibility to
expand in the future.
Chris Loeffler is global applications
manager, data center solutions,
Eaton Corp., Cleveland.
For more information
(click here)