Time for precision power

Power accounts for nearly 30 percent of the operating cost of your average data centre. 35 to 40 percent of the power in a data centre is used for cooling. Given this, data centres are turning to precision power and air control solutions that integrate all their power and cooling requirements. By Tanu Talwar

The buoyancy of the Indian economy is reflected in the boom experienced by the data centre industry. Today, data centres have become a mandatory requirement of every growing business irrespective of the vertical it operates in. The phenomenal growth experienced by the data centre industry has produced a concomitant demand for advanced precision power conditioning and control solutions. The data centre has become the nerve centre of enterprise business operations without which a company may lose revenue, customers and credibility.

Data centre disruption can be catastrophic

For a data centre ensuring business critical continuity to avoid interruptions or data loss is of prime importance. Sandeep Nair, managing director, Emerson Network Power India Pvt Ltd says, “It is essential for businesses to ensure that the right protective mechanism is in place, most often in geographically dispersed locations, so that data access can continue uninterrupted.” Unlike the situation a few years back, companies keep their data on servers for all their mission critical applications that need to be accessible globally. This scenario has caused an increasing demand for uninterrupted power supply to combat ever-rising power outages.

According to Pankaj Sharma, country general manager, APC India, “As the power sector struggles to meet the required demand, lack of power or inadequate power has made ensuring uptime a challenging task. This in turn has raised concerns over the environment in which a company’s servers and other sensitive IT equipment operate in a data centre.” Seconding this opinion, Col. Balwinder Singh, director, Targus Technologies says, “It is the criticality of network uptime which is fuelling the demand for enhanced power conditioning solutions in data centres. If power outages are not managed proactively they result in downtimes which can be fatal to the business especially when revenues depend entirely on business applications as is the case with inter-bank financial transactions, railways and airline reservation systems, ATMs, mobile telephony and the like.”

Today, data centres have high-density requirements such as deployment of blade servers for server consolidation. These have further raised the demand for proper power conditioning and management solutions. Additionally, as IT infrastructure becomes increasingly sophisticated day-by-day there is a need to monitor and manage this IT environment, as the CIO is now accountable for any network disruption and the corresponding losses even if it is on account of power failure. These factors have undoubtedly raised the demand for advanced power and cooling control solutions for data centres.

Power and cooling costs are escalating

With real estate prices escalating, server consolidation and equipment compaction are the two key trends observed in the data centre space. Sharma explains, “The price boom experienced by the property sector is clearly reflected upon data centres and server rooms whereby server consolidation and virtualisation are at an all time high. An obvious result of this consolidation is the increasing heat and density generated inside the data centre.” Though, server consolidation offers an answer to space constraints the dangers attached to it cannot be ignored. The fact remains that this kind of equipment consolidation besides consuming tremendous electricity and other useful resources such as IT maintenance staff, generates huge volumes of heat due to the way in which processors are packed and compressed together. A chief concern within the industry vis-a-vis this trend has been to find solutions to maintain this ecosystem by finding power conditioning methods that incorporate higher wattage per cubic inch as well as cool these hot spots efficiently.

Then again, the growing expenditure on power and air conditioning equipment within the data centres has become a cause for concern within the industry. Today, data centres are not merely regarded as rooms built to house countless racks of servers but as an ecosystem, that requires continuous flow of energy in the form of electricity to run and maintain its positive equilibrium. With the ever-increasing interactions among processors, rack systems, power and air control systems, data storage, cooling systems, networks and communications channels, the data centre ecosystem requires a constant input of energy to support virtually every critical business and scientific computing need both within and without an organisation. However, maintaining processor power, semiconductor density and the resulting heat generated consumes tremendous power and casts a dwindling effect on the performance of a data centre that is inadequately endowed in terms of energy requirements. Equipping a server room with uninterrupted energy supply has a profound effect on the operating cost of running a data centre.

A significant sum of the total expenditure in a data centre goes towards supplying and equipping it with environmental control solutions like power and air conditioning. According to Nair, “For most data centres power accounts for nearly 30 percent of the operating cost whereas 35 to 40 percent of data centre power is used for cooling. Looking at the scenario, one finds that businesses are increasingly demanding precision power and air control solutions that integrate all their power and cooling requirements.” The fact remains that data centres are expensive to deploy and even more costly to run. IT leaders are also under pressure to manage costs and cut down the total cost of ownership. It’s not acceptable to let data centre costs spiral out of control thereby increasing the demand for efficient and cost-effective solutions.

Wanted: An end-to-end solution

Observing these trends vendors are gearing up to meet the needs of the sector and are packing advanced features at a more competitive and attractive price. The phenomenal growth undergone by the sector has provided vendors with the impetus to change their stereotypical service of offering standalone power backup to offering end-to-end data centre control management solutions that provide not only heat and power control features but take care of the entire infrastructure upon which this ecosystem is based.

Emerson Networks has launched power conditioning solutions for the data centre. The company has clearly moving from its customary role of standalone power backup provider into the data room management market. “Power conditioning is not just about a pure power solution (UPS). It also includes cooling through towers and precision air conditioners, racks, service and management systems. The complexities and the need to manage these services more effectively are reflected in the market that is fast moving towards an adaptive architecture that promises to be adaptive, flexible and above all is cost friendly,” says Nair. The company has recently launched its adaptive architecture that comprises of a rack cooling solutions and the Liebert series of products.

Talking about the architecture, Nair, asserts, “Enterprises need power and cooling solutions that can meet their requirement today and yet adapt to their requirements tomorrow when even they are not aware of exactly what those needs might be.” Therefore, the infrastructure in place should be adaptive offering a combination of new power, cooling and monitoring technologies that bring flexibility in modularity, scalability and availability at an affordable price point. These products are targeted at the IT, BPO, telecom, and pharmaceutical verticals. Using these products Nair claims, that data centres can save up to 31 percent currently spent upon cooling needs achieving an increase of over 22 percent in IT capacity.

The past few years have witnessed a fundamental change in data centre design. The increasing power demands of data centres due to advanced network server technology have necessitated a radical change in cooling technology to control the heat loads generated by these data centres. Hence ‘Rack Cooling Solutions’ have become the norm and a key component of cooling solutions as the servers are housed in these racks. “Nowadays, in a few server processor designs, cooling solutions are being incorporated at the chip level,” says Nair. Emerson entered the rack cooling solutions segment last year post its acquisition of Knurr AG, the global leader in rack and enclosure technologies for IT and telecom vertical. With the launch of rack-cooling solutions as part of its portfolio, the company now delivers a portfolio of technologies—taking proven cooling technologies from room-level applications and integrating them into the rack.

Talking about products, APC too has expanded its role and is offering a range of solutions for the server/data room management. The company has been providing its InfraStruXure architecture comprising of a range of products. Sharma, explains, “The challenge for all critical power and cooling vendors is to innovate and manufacture power conditioning equipment which ensures maximum uptime and ease of use along with service and sales support.” The key is to provide services and solutions that are serviceable, remote manageable and can give predictive failure alerts.

Sharma says, “We offer solutions with efficiencies greater than 96 percent. Our InfraStruXure technology offers data centre on demand. With this technology, organisations can accelerate the speed-of-deployment and adapt to evolving needs of their business and operations.” Furthermore, the Network Critical Physical Infrastructure (NCPI) audit services for organisations can help them detect vulnerabilities in their NCPI and the report that is given after the audit can be used to optimise the same. Poorly designed power and environmental facilities have a major impact on the day-to-day operation and overall life expectancy of NCPI components. Data pertaining to electrical loads, wiring practices, power quality, existing power protection equipment, cooling requirements and environmental conditions is collected and a customised report is developed which includes the ideal facility plan for a site.

Vendors are increasingly targeting both small and the large enterprises by designing holistic solutions for critical server rooms, data centres and disaster recovery (DR) centres. The fact remains that business are moving towards integrated solutions rather than point products. Enterprises are fast realising the importance of power conditioning but as they remain cost conscious, vendors are packing more features at an affordable price.

One of the most important reasons prompting vendors to diversify their portfolio of offerings remains the tremendous increase in the number of data centres. According to Nair, “Data centres have been growing at a rapid pace in India. It is estimated that the data centre market in India is close to $100 million. With this kind of growth, demand for power conditioning and the physical infrastructure management solutions can only grow further.”

Sharma says,” Our portfolio has widened mainly due to customers looking for partners who offer complete solutions rather than mere components.” Then again, it has become necessary to diversify into numerous solutions, as the margins in standalone products are extremely low. With enterprises getting ready to outsource their non-core mission-critical IT applications so that they can concentrate on their core business models, vendors have more opportunities to tap.

In order, to capitalise on these ever growing business possibilities, solutions providers are aggressively looking at acquisitions to bring the best under their umbrella. APC has been on the acquisition road for long and had acquired Airflow, a premier cooling equipment manufacturer in 2000 and Technikon, a leading developer of self contained rack enclosures in 2003. It recently merged and joined forces with MGE UPS Systems. The deal would enable the company to offer the industry’s most comprehensive product and solution range for critical IT and process applications in industrial, enterprise, small and medium business and home environments. The solutions shall not only include UPS but also precision cooling units, racks, and design and management software.

Emerson Network Power is also in acquisition mode and has recently acquired Knurr AG, a global leader in rack and enclosure technologies. Talking about the Knurr edge, Nair explains Knurr has shipped out water cooled racks which can house high energy consuming servers.” The deal has armed Emerson with Knurr’s platform of rack systems. With the acquisition done, the company further plans to make significant changes in its operations schedule and aims to cut down average lead time from the industry standard of three to five weeks to practically zero for all products. “Knurr’s expertise in racks and its ready pool of more than 400 patented designs also allow Emerson to customise and build racks to meet our dynamic customer requirements,” adds Nair.

Poised for growth

Today, critical facilities are experiencing greater changes and uncertainty than at any time in the last twenty years. The data centre, computer rooms, network closets as well as the entire IT network are at a pivotal stage in their evolution. It is no longer about managing growth; it is about managing uncertainty, density and capacity that have been driven by unpredictable growth in capacity, consolidation of critical facilities, convergence of voice, video and data.

Observing the scenario, Nair comments, “Enterprises now need a power and cooling infrastructure that can work across their infrastructures and respond to constant change.” They need an infrastructure that allows them to deploy blade servers and other high-density equipment safely and cost-effectively, that can meet the strict power quality requirements of VoIP switches. In short, they are calling out for infrastructure that allows them to add capacity without compromising upon availability or serviceability.

Though there is no syndicated study to endorse the upsurge experienced by the data centre industry in India, vendors remain optimistic. Sharma explains, “There has been enormous growth in the data centre market and the number of green-field projects that are being implemented in India. Every data centre deployment and expansion project will need power conditioning solutions and therefore the market for these precision power and cooling solutions is also set to expand further.”