Power Protection and UPS Blog

Where is the resilience ? Jason Yates and I have been discussing resilience recently and how far this should be pushed through out an installation. A recent PDU failure caused by a burnt out cable at London internet hub provider Telehouse, shows just how important resilience can be. A resilient electrical power design ensures that the critical load remains powered at all times and cannot be brought down by a single point of failure as it appears happened here. As Andrew Charlesworth at vnunet.com commented: “So, presumably, right now there is an electrician looking at the burned out cable, sucking in air over his teeth and muttering - what cowboy put that in, then?” - for more information click here.

I doubt that many people realise just how unenvironmentally friendly diesel generating sets are - due to the pollution and particulates they can generate. In New York the utility companies asked for consumers to conserve power during the recent heat wave and New Yorkers did this by plumbing in over 1000MW of distributed power! Summer air is always more polluted than winter but during this period the use of so much diesel generated power simply made matters worst in New York. For more information see The New York Times.

Last week, power cuts in Maidstone disrupted a datacentre operated by CSC Alliance. This lead to a computer system failure affecting over 80 NHS hospital trusts. Such incidents highlight the need for power protection as reported by IT Week.

Viatel, a business communications service provider just released the results of a new survey of 100 top IT directors. The results show that whilst 80% have a business continuity plan, 62% do not cover their phone systems. During a power failure they are totally reliant on the mobile phones they provide to their employees. The report also found that a third of the survey respondents still suffered a week after, with some still not able to access their data systems. Michael Davies of Vitael commented: “Having a comprehensive business continuity plan in place is no longer an option but a necessity.” How true.

This is a really exciting piece of news for Riello UPS who this year supplied over 3.2MVA of Master Dialog UPS for the G8 summit meeting in St Pitersburg, Russia. The UPS were installed into eight shelters and protected vital communications and security systems within the Konstantin palace in Strelna. In all two 600kVA, two 400kVA and six 200kVA parallel-redundant UPS were installed.

The recent heat wave has highlighted just how little spare electrical capacity we have within the UK. Sudden failures in London, for example, left electricity companies asking users to reduce their power demands and turn off air conditioners. With another heat wave forecast for later this month we can only expect further power problems and failures. For more information on the London power cuts see the Telegraph.co.uk article