Transcript Slide 1

Case Study: Colt
Are modular data centres key to
meeting your requirements now
and in the future?
When Colt Data Centre Services decided to be among the first
to manufacture the next generation of modular data centres it
turned to Uninterruptible Power Supplies Limited (UPSL), a
Kohler company, to provide the efficiency and flexibility it
required for its modular power protection.
The idea of a rapidly deployed, modular data centre is nothing
new; in fact, container-based data centre solutions have been
making their presence known for several years, especially
since 2006. Back then Sun Microsystems introduced project
Blackbox, which represented the first containerised facility from
a major OEM. In spite of this innovation, the limitations in terms
of scalability, internal flexibility and the temporary nature of
container based facilities means they are still unsuitable for
most organisations’ long-term data centre requirements.
End user: Colt
Industry:
Telecommunications
Scope:
Design and installation of
a new electrical power including
UPS power protection & service
Product:
PowerWAVE 6000 & 5000/T
Contact:
Uninterruptible Power Supplies Ltd
Bacchus House
Calleva Park
Aldermaston
Berkshire
RG7 8EN
Phone:
0118 981 5151
Email:
[email protected]
Web:
www.upspower.co.uk
The answer therefore, or at least for those who are unable to
wait two years for a traditional data centre, would seem to be a
third generation of modular data centres. This new incarnation
of the modular approach is capable of being constructed and
commissioned in a matter of weeks, but most importantly it
comes without the limitations of other modular systems and
with the advantages of both traditional and container data
centres.
Colt understood the potential for this new area and has created
a separate business division, Colt Data Centre Services, to
focus purely on data centre services and deliver a new and
totally different solution to the data-centre provision challenges
organisations face today. Colt has a long pedigree in this area,
owning and operating 19 major data centres across Europe, as
well as delivering data centre space to thousands of business
customers for more than 15 years – making the company well
placed to fully understand the ever changing requirements of its
customers.
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Akber Jaffer, general manager at Colt Data Centre Services, commented on why high specification
modular data centres are key to the data centre industry’s future:
“Our large-scale, data centre halls are manufactured in approved locations using the latest production
line techniques geared to providing the highest quality and high specification data centre halls.
Everything is built in-house, using industry leading modular components, before being delivered to site
in transportable modules for easy reconstruction. All of this means we are able to cut the time it takes to
design and build-out a conventional bespoke data centre by more than two thirds, and can deliver to our
customers a complete facility with upwards of 500m2 of data centre space in less than four months,
with guaranteed quality and minimal disruption to the site. Compare this to any other system and you
can really see why this area of the market is witnessing such strong demand.”
Colt Data Centre Services believes a modular hall
solution enables its customers to meet almost all of
their data centre challenges, using facilities which are
fully built and staged before they are transported to a
client’s site. From there Colt will install and commission
the data centre, delivering a finished product ready for
installation of equipment. Alternatively, customers can
choose to place their data centre in one of Colt’s own
data centres, where build-out technology allows
customers to increase their capacity in-line with their
requirements, as well as meet any space and power
needs, both now and in the future.
The streamlining of the design and production processes is not the only benefit as Jaffer explains:
“The short lead-time is an obvious and huge advantage to clients who are able to get the space and
facilities they require in months, rather than years. This also means the technology is still up-to-date
and all the associated costs are significantly reduced. But, quality, energy efficiency and total cost of
ownership (TCO) are also vital and we have incorporated every inbuilt efficiency possible to make the
product more powerful and less expensive to run than any other competitive system. We estimate,
based on our own experience, our Modular solution can cut the cost of ownership of a comparable
traditional data centre by around 40%”.
Power and environmental sustainability have become major issues for every IT department and
boardroom across the country and new products are unlikely to enter the marketplace without
addressing their energy efficiency credentials. The Data Centre represents one of the largest drains
on resources within an organisation, as confirmed in the 2009 Frost and Sullivan report, which claimed
that up to 40 percent of a company’s total power could be associated with data centre infrastructure.
Colt DCS understood the importance of providing its customers with the smallest carbon footprint and
lowest energy draw possible, so turned to the market to find the best third party products available in
each area.
Finding the right UPS supplier
When it came to selecting its UPS partner, Colt DCS had an exacting list of requirements, including
class leading efficiency and lowest TCO, as well as a primary need for small physical footprint (see
box-out for more detail) in order to optimise its modular design.
Neil Ashdown, Chief Infrastructure Architect at Colt DCS picks up the story: “The initial tender process
for a UPS supplier saw a few organisations stand out with the capabilities and product range to
support the project, but eventually we chose UPSL because of their ability to meet our requirements in
every area. All the products UPSL offered were highly energy efficient, three phase UPS systems, with
low TCO. We saw these as key considerations for our clients, who need to know the system they are
buying into is affordable in the long-term and that ongoing maintenance costs are reasonable”.
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Preventative maintenance means that companies have the reassurance that the UPS will perform to
requirements and keep business systems running.“
Preventative maintenance enables Uninterruptible Power Supplies Limited engineers to check system
calibrations, evaluate operating conditions, ensure that components are working and to assess the
optimum time for their replacement.
“Our data centres have been designed to maximise the available space for racks, which included
optimising the design for where support equipment - such as power & cooling - is located. With that in
mind, we have created support service modules, which are installed at each end of the data centre
module (each Colt DC consists of 12 modules which are assembled to create one large, unrestricted
data centre hall) and which contain the UPS at one end and all the cooling equipment at the other.
This not only ensures we are not using any rack space but also assists cooling. In addition, it also
means the cost of ongoing maintenance is reduced – for example, the standardisation of the UPS and
cooling modules dramatically reduces the need for spares or engineer training on different systems or
sites. On the other hand, this does mean the physical footprint of the UPS is another important
consideration.”
Each of Colt DCS’s modules is constructed to deliver class
leading levels of resilience, at a standard tiering level of Tier 3
overall and Tier 4 for the power infrastructure. This provides a
high degree of redundancy throughout the facility, which
extends to the chosen UPS system. Each of the initial 12
modules will feature three integrated UPS units, designed to
support the critical load and the mechanical load. Each
configuration uses two UPSL PowerWAVE 6000s, with a load
capacity of 80KVA, working in an N + N redundant formation.
The third UPS is the smaller PowerWAVE 5000T, also from
UPSL, which supports the mechanical load.
The PowerWave6000 three-phase UPS was chosen by Colt for
its transformerless design and energy saving inverter switching
(ESIS) technology, which delivers best-in-class performance
and efficiency; saving valuable floor space and achieving
significant TCO savings. In line with Colt’s requirement for a
maximum load of 80KVA per module, the PowerWave6000 has
a capacity of 60KVA to 200KVA, parallelable up to 2MVA and
features exceptionally high operating efficiency – offering
95.5% efficiency from a load of 25% or higher, further reducing
power consumption. The UPS also offers low input harmonic
distortion (THDi<3.5%) and is blade server friendly – providing
fully rated output power to power factors between 0.9 leading
and 0.73 lagging.
Ashdown further explains the reasons behind Colt’s choice of UPS: “We understand the importance of
maintaining a tight control of commissioning costs but ongoing efficiency, TCO and excellent support
are even more important to our clients. That’s one of the reasons we went with the UPS system from
UPSL, as the chosen products are highly efficient and have a very flat efficiency curve when the load
is above 25%, which it always will be, which means the UPS isn’t wasting energy. The PowerWAVE
6000 also has a very small heat build up, which was important due to the confined space in which the
UPS is housed”.
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“The other UPS that Colt will be using is the highly compact PowerWAVE 5000T, which is being
employed purely to support the mechanical load. I think this is one of the areas where Colt DCS stand
out from its competition, who are unlikely to go to support this load as standard.”
The PowerWAVE 5000T is a true online, double-conversion ups that provides power protection in a
compact format for loads of 7.5kVA to 40kVA. Highly efficient (up to 95%) across a wide load range,
the UPS has a small footprint, delivering a power density of up to 86kW/m2 and allowing substantial
and valuable space savings even at the highest power ratings.
Looking towards the future
The relationship between UPSL and Colt, to supply the initial 36 UPS units for the initial proof of
concept, fulfilled only the first stage of the project and helped to drive a strong demand for Colt’s
modular data centre approach, and the initial concept built for internal Colt use has now been fully
productised by Colt DCS and is now offered to the wider commercial market.
Ashdown concludes: “We are definitely seeing the large-scale, modular approach as a big growth area
for the data centre industry. The idea of spending huge sums to build bespoke data centres -which
may never be filled to capacity - is unlikely to continue at the same rate as it has. Far more probable is
that upcoming business models such as cloud computing and co-location will drive a different
behaviour pattern to data centre procurement, and modularity is likely to be the winning technological
approach to the future. All of these options enable a ‘pay as you grow’ approach to capacity, which
with costs ever-increasing, represents a far more rational and prudent way to plan for a business’s
future.”
Contact
Uninterruptible Power Supplies Ltd
Bacchus House
Calleva Park
Aldermaston
Berkshire
RG7 8EN
Phone:
Email:
Web:
0118 981 5151
[email protected]
www.upspower.co.uk
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