Failure is not an option, but can the perfect storm happen?
With Europe roasting in all-time highs, excessive heat creates on-going challenges to the grid. the more heat, the more power is required for air conditioning across the UK. It is quite probable that after a hot summer, a bitterly cold winter will follow, demanding more power to keep us all warm. this all stacks up to create the setting for a ‘perfect storm,’ where the delicate balance between available power and capacity turns into an harmonic nightmare for grid supplies.
Power cuts? Yes they do and will happen, but how? Transformers can trip out, overheat, die with age, or the most common, digger damage and breaker failure. even more commonly though, spikes and brown outs caused by the over reliance on alternative energy sources (wind and solar), which have inherent harmonic distortion issues, will be your most regular day-to-day issue. the greater the percentage of such alternative energy the grid produces, the greater the harmonic distortions, and the more vulnerable we become to spikes and brownouts.
Powercontinuity engineers provide a site survey to confirm the status of your existing data centre or production facility, which will expose whether it is robust enough to withstand power disruption or gird failure, or not.
Prevention is better than cure
Failure is not an option, but it can happen and there are a number of obvious points for concern:
– Chiller failure due to aged chillers struggling to cope with demand.
– LV breakers tripping out due to a power surge.
– HV Breakers tripping out due to faults up stream.
– Aged UPS or wrongly specified UPS can let spikes or brownouts through.
– Lack of maintenance or any maintenance records.
Powercontinuity can ensure the power into your data centre is resilient by designing and installing dual power protection supplies supporting an A feed and B feed as a minimum. That is the start of the journey. the company will provide the design for n+n uninterruptible power supported by rapid start synchronised generators, with forever-capacity fuel tanks. that in itself, is a good basis for power continuity, but without understanding the precise status of the downstream racks and servers, there is still the risk of power failure. Why? data centre management often have no records of ‘in rack’ static switches or ‘in rack’ UPSs together with no service and maintenance records. Worst still, over worked systems managers can overload racks by simply placing the newest servers in the most convenient racks without checking the capacity of the fuses or PDU. At that point failure is no longer an option, it becomes inevitable.
Power Continuity can prevent your failure before it happens
Powercontinuity engineers can carry out a full site investigation, thermal imaging, load bank testing, mains failure tests, and create up-to-date electrical schematics. Powercontinuity can also upgrade your fire suppression system, as well as upgrade your air conditioning systems, all whist your data centre remains live and operational, and advise on the present risks and how to mitigate them. take a few moments to take the ‘is my company at risk’ test by checking out powercontinuity.co.uk/business- continuity-health-check/
powercontinuity has decades of installations across the UK, all operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, power protecting the backbone of UK infrastructure. powercontinuity can do the same for you. As your site main contractor, the company ensure the best practice at all times in order to deliver within budget and ahead of schedule. engineers will install everything themselves in-house and will even witness test the compete system in front of you.
Powercontinuity is a company that cares. With a Powercontinuity engineer by your side, it is not the numbers that count, it is the quality of the installation. Powercontinuity monitor and maintain power continuity.
PowerContinuity
T: 0845 055 8455
powercontinuity.co.uk
