Powering a Datacenter

Datacenter power usage will be the No. 1 infrastructure concern facing IT executives over the next three years, according to a Robert Frances Group research report.  Our experience, and that of our peers, is totally aligned with this finding.

Over the past five years we have seen average power requirements per rack grow from 1 to 3 kilowatts to a typical 5 to 8 kilowatts today.  Racks loaded with high density blade servers can take this number to 20 to 30 Kilowatts per rack. These changes to cabinet and rack power profiles have caused many datacenters to be operating at or near their peak power consumption limits.  With that increase in power consumption comes an associated increase in cooling requirements – which have also reached their limit. 

NewVista can help you address the power and cooling limitations in your current space, or can assist you in defining today's requirements and projections for the future to plan for a new facility or colocation.

NewVista focuses our datacenter power architectures on addressing a number of key issues:

• We ensure that the maximum available power will minimally support the projected power needs that can be forecasted over a reasonable horizon

• We architect the power system to have the appropriate redundancies and diversities to ensure that the desired level of availability can be achieved as a minimum

• We work to ensure the power system efficiency is as high as possible

• We design the power systems to ideally be built in a modular fashion, allowing capital costs, efficiency costs and operational costs to grow as they are needed and not lie idle in a near empty room for the first three years.

Many of the design disasters we have witnessed are caused by not understanding the current building conditions and not exploring the alternatives in sufficient depth (the hit and run engineering design). 

 As an example, in most all cases, you can only consume as much power as your landlord says you can consume.  This immediate limitation often drives the datacenter design and drives its limitations.  Engineers and electricians go hunting for where they can pick up the power they need ( “we can get 200 amps from the bus switch on the 7^th floor”), piecing together  parts into a complex, failure prone design.  With a bit more thought, a private circuit to the utility’s switchgear in the basement could both remove the complexity and remove the power limitations by the landlord.  NewVista will explore such options and make a recommendation that meets the need, with the fewest exposures and limitations at the best price.