Protect Your Data Center During Power Outages and Heatwaves
IT Infrastructure located in a hot climate is a challenge. This is exasperated when heatwaves occur. Abnormally hot temperatures present considerable challenges to your Data Center.
Protect Your Data Center During Power Outages and Heatwaves.
Heatwaves increase the demand placed on public power grids. The increased demand means power grids are more subject to failure. It is therefore important to protect your Data Center during power outages. Without proper backup power systems in place downtime and data loss if servers and not shutdown gracefully will occur. Such failures are becoming more common as the global average temperatures are rising. Therefore, it is very important that your organization has proper environmental monitoring equipment and backup systems in place at your Data Center.
The most common power issues in the Data Center are:
- The main power line is physically damaged or overloaded
- Instability of the main power frequency
- Electrical noise (oscillation), usually caused by nearby equipment
- Voltage spikes, over-voltage
- Momentary or sustained under-voltage
- Distortion of the sine waveform on the power line
In this article, we will examine some common Data Center backup power systems, their monitoring, and power outage scenarios.
Planning your backup systems
During the design of your datacenter – whether it’s just a small computer room with a few servers and a single air conditioner or a large multi-level facility with supercomputers – the necessary backup systems have to be in place. At a minimum, the backup power system should be in the form of UPS to allow for temporary power outages, fluctuations and provide sufficient time for graceful shutdown. A UPS is however just a short term backup power. It provides sufficient power during the transition between mainline power and generators. Power outages usually last between 1 and 6 hours, and this is too long a time for the servers to be working from batteries alone.
If you have a small server room and no generator backup, then the switching of the UPS to battery mode should signal the servers to enter a controlled shutdown after a few minutes, if the main power doesn’t return during this time.
A mainline power failure has serious implications for the cooling systems of the Data Center. HVAC and chilled water plant systems cannot function on UPS battery power. Temperature can quickly elevate to levels that can result in server failures and thermal shutdown. Operating IT equipment at elevated temperatures will also affect its longevity. National Instruments tests noted that just a 5 °C (41 F) increase in temperature can reduce a hard drive’s life by as much as two years.
Properly sized backup power generators should be installed to ensure continuous operation of Data Center cooling systems during power outages. In addition, an environmental monitoring system (EMS) in the Data Center hall will monitor and alert should temperatures be outside of the prescribed range. Power monitoring and remote generator monitoring systems ensure that backup power systems are ready when called upon and capable of maintaining the loads put upon them.