Electrical Systems
This is a picture of the corridor around the I.Net Data Center in Milan showing much of the M&E equipment that is normally housed within the data center hall located outside.
So what are the benefits? Equipment can be maintained, filters changed etc.. without entering the raised floor area. Any heat load from the equipment is [...]
One of the things that prompted me to write about CHP and Biomass was an email I received from a colleague, Howard Pheby of 5 nines. Howard, and his partner Paul Foskett, are announcing their plans to build a new data center complex co-located with a Biomass Plant just up the road from my home [...]
Continue ReadingAs we have been discussing CHP and Biomass Power Stations recently, I though that it might be interesting to explore this subject in more detail. I live in East Anglia in England, a largely agricultural area that is leading the way in Biomass electricity production, so this is a matter of local interest for me. [...]
Continue ReadingIf, like most of us, you use a diesel generator as a backup power source during electrical outages, you need to understand something about Data Center engines and how to keep them running sweetly, starting automatically and reliably. It is horribly career limiting to spend your shareholders money on some equipment that you only need once every [...]
Continue ReadingI have just been exchanging emails with my good friend and colleague, Will Forest. Will runs the Data Center Consulting Practice for top drawer strategy consultants, McKinsey & Company. I engaged Will, and we worked together on delivering BT’s Data Center Strategy. Will and his team brought a great deal of experience and clarity of [...]
Continue ReadingA key management principle is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So if we want to manage the energy efficiency of our data center estate, then we had better be in a position to baseline where we are today so that we can identify the value of the changes that we implement.
The problem [...]
Way, way back in the stone age (whilst I was a student) I worked in the Edinburgh University Computer Labs keeping all of the hardware going. I had got a report of a DEC PDP 9 (drop me a mail if you know what one of these is) that kept restarting every few days all [...]
Continue ReadingWe all worry about failures in our data centers, some types of failure more than others. Losing a server is bad, losing a storage array extremely bad! How then might we categorize a full power failure in a data centre? Catastrophic certainly, even careless perhaps?
I can hear the questions already:
How could I have a full [...]
The consequences of data center failure can be pretty catastrophic for your business, so unsurprisingly, you will have very high expectations about availability and reliability. Unfortunately for many of us, our expectations will not be met by reality. Very often the system that is our data center facility is significantly less reliable than we might [...]
Continue ReadingElectricity is a traded commodity with a Futures Market, exactly like oil, tea and pork bellies. The wholesale electricity price is driven by analysts’ perceptions of the relationship between supply (how much is readily available and at what cost) and demand (how much is required now and in the future).
The wholesale electricity price is one of the [...]
The thing about data centers is just how much power they use. This one in Cardiff, Wales uses about 20MW of power and has huge strings of batteries storing power to drive the UPS units. The batteries are kept in dedicated battery rooms that are air conditioned to keep the cells cool and maintain a [...]
Continue ReadingDC Power in Data Centres
The discussions amongst Data Centre specialist about the relative benefits of AC and DC are by far the most heated. In my opinion these are mainly driven by the technology that the protagonists are most comfortable with. The 20th Century Data Centre guys are all into AC, it is [...]
Continue ReadingWhere does all the power go?
Electrical power generally originates from a machine that turns water into steam to turn turbines (or HEP, Gas Turbine) - in all cases some form of original energy is used to drive a generator set. Typical coal, nuclear or oil fired power stations generate steam to drive the generators. [...]
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