APC embraces challenge of reducing energy usage

Call it growing pains, although not in a conventional sense. As businesses rely more on tools driven by electricity and energy prices soar, the call for data center equipment that is energy-efficient is growing by leaps and bounds.
And that is a call that APC-MGE (as the former American Power Conversion is known, post-acquisition by France’s Schneider Electric) is happy to take.
“When density was low and energy was cheap, no one cared about the energy use,” said Russell Senesac, a product manager for the company’s “InfraStruXure” system.
But now, he said, all that has changed.
“There’s more of a discussion because of the cost of energy and an increase in the density of the equipment going into the data centers. If you’re a bank and you’re offering online banking, or you’re a business that has voice over IP [VoIP] phones or even someone who uses Internet gaming – all of this is causing more density. Every time there’s a keystroke, it’s creating a demand for electricity somewhere,” he said. “And you’re trying to put more stuff in at a time when electricity costs more.”
At APC-MGE, which is based in West Kingston but has offices worldwide and markets products under the American Power Conversion and MGE brands, Senesac said that when clients express concern about the efficiency of their data centers, the company addresses them in the two major problem areas – power usage and cooling.
The primary concern with power usage is whether the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) being used is consuming as little energy as it can.
“In the past, UPSs were designed to run most efficiently with a 100-percent load,” Senesac said “So the efficiency curve is good at 100-percent load, but once it’s down to 70-percent load, you drop down the efficiency.”
But as data centers plan for growth, they must build in excess capacity, leading to inefficiency. “Customers typically only redo physical infrastructure every 10 years. … So they oversize the system they put in to try to guess what’s going to happen. So if I only need 10 kilowatts but I might need 100 later, I’m going to install 100 now,” he said. “But if it’s not running efficiently, it’s just giving off heat.”
New technology, such as modular data center equipment, including products from IBM, allow the center to scale to meet demand, and thus run closer to full capacity at all times.
“It’s the ability to give you smaller Lego blocks,” Senesac said. “Now you can match your demand as you need it, so you don’t have to buy 30 [units] today trying to guess if you’ll need it down the road.”
The other area of concern is cooling, which is integral to keeping a data center running. But it is also a major drain on electricity.
Normally, large air conditioning units around the perimeter of the room blow cool air under a raised floor, which then circulates into the data modules through holes in the floor.
“From an efficiency standpoint, it takes a lot of energy to pressurize that floor,” Senesac said.
But a new system from APC miniaturizes the coolers and places them where they are needed. “It fits in a rack so it’s closer to where the heat’s being created. And little fans draw less power than big fans do,” he said.
To get the best use out of the hardware, APC has created software that monitors energy usage. “Traditionally in the space it would be a bunch of big boxes with batteries,” Senesac said. “Now it’s much more IT-centric. The software runs on these systems and tells you how to optimize them.”
And in the end, the power savings can be impressive.
“You should see upwards of 30- to 35-percent reduction in energy,” he said.

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