Don’t Compromise Power Protection for the Sake of Energy Efficiency
I was reading the cover story of December’s InformationAge at the weekend: Crossed Wires – Myths and Misconceptions of IT’s Energy Crisis, and I was horrified by some of the controversial views and opinions expressed therein. In my mind the article fell short of addressing the so called ‘Myths and Misconceptions’ but rather replaced them with even more perilous and unproven ones.
Basically, it focuses on data centres and how they are wasting vast amounts of energy. There are some companies out there ripping up the rule book, apparently, in terms of cooling requirements, power protection, conversion, and ambient temperature!
I agree that there is a pressing need to address the problem of excessive power consumption in data centres but to do it by such radical measures as fresh-air cooling, the elimination of UPS and running at temperatures from five to 50 degrees centigrade is going to create more chaos and cost far more, replacing damaged equipment and compensating for down time, in the long run than sensible energy-efficiency measures. Fresh air cooling, for example, may introduce contamination and even humidity that has the potential to damage sensitive data centre equipment or lead to expensive wear-and-tear. The argument raised in the article around UPS suggests that it adds to energy wastage as a result of the necessary power conversion back and forth from AC to DC. Some experts believe that data centres can be run completely on DC power to avoid this. This is not true: firstly, today’s UPS are designed to be hugely efficient and help project the life of computer equipment through conditioning of the voltage current as well as providing essential power protection and continuity of critical systems. Running only on DC power would require unfeasible amounts of copper wiring. The argument about temperature is also flawed: computer equipment can withstand fluctuations outside of the recommended 20-24 degrees centigrade but anything that contains consumables, fans and batteries, will be severely compromised by such practices. Fans will be continually over exerted in high ambient temperatures and batteries will need replacing more frequently at anything above or below this recommendation.
It doesn’t take much downtime to cripple a business these days. Energy efficiency and intelligent power management should go hand-in-hand with power protection not instead of. See Riello UPS for more information on power protection and energy efficiency.
