APC White Paper Podcast: Recent Episodes
American Power Conversion
These white paper excerpts provide the techniques, guidelines and tools you need to make the most effective decisions regarding your IT installations.
System planning is the Achilles' heel of a data center physical infrastructure project. Planning mistakes can magnify and propagate through later deployment phases, resulting in delays, cost overruns, wasted time, and ultimately a compromised system. Much of the trouble can be eliminated by viewing system planning as a data flow model, with an orderly sequence of tasks that progressively transform and refine information from initial concept to final design.
System planning is the Achilles' heel of a data center physical infrastructure project. Planning mistakes can magnify and propagate through later deployment phases, resulting in delays, cost overruns, wasted time, and ultimately a compromised system. Much of the trouble can be eliminated by viewing system planning as a data flow model, with an orderly sequence of tasks that progressively transform and refine information from initial concept to final design.
As the design and deployment of data center physical infrastructure moves away from art and move toward science, the benefits of a standardized and predictable process are becoming compelling. Beyond the ordering, delivery, and installation of hardware, any build or upgrade project depends critically upon a well-defined process as insurance against surprises, cost overruns, delays, and frustration. This paper presents an overview of a standardized, step-by-step process methodology that can be adapted and configured to suit individual requirements.
A Quantitative Comparison of High Efficiency AC vs DC Power Distribution for Data Centers (#127)
Alternatives for providing electrical power to high density racks in Data Centers and Network Rooms are explained and compared. Issues addressed include quantity of feeds, single-phase vs. three-phase, number and location of circuit breakers, overload, selection of plug types, selection of voltage, redundancy, and loss of redundancy. The need for the rack power system to adapt to changing requirements is identified and quantified. Guidelines are defined for rack power systems that can reliably deliver power to high density loads while adapting to changing needs.
Many of the mysteries of equipment failure, downtime, software and data corruption, are often the result of a problematic supply of power. There is also a common problem with describing power problems in a standard way. This white paper will describe the most common types of power disturbances, what can cause them, what they can do to your critical equipment, and how to safeguard your equipment, using the IEEE standards for describing power quality problems.
This Technical Note discusses many common misunderstandings about the function of the neutral wire and its relation to power problems. The subjects of dedicated lines, phase reversal, isolation transformers, and grounding are addressed. Various myths are described and criticized.
Well-informed accounting treatment of Network-Critical Physical Infrastructure (NCPI) assets provides significant opportunities to contribute to improving the financial performance of a business, institution, or organization. Design and manufacturing improvements in modular, scalable UPS systems, power distribution units (PDUs), and computer room air conditioners have not only created technological benefits, but provide entirely new NCPI asset management opportunities with direct and measurable financial benefits.
An Emergency Power Off (EPO) system is intended to power down a single piece of electronic equipment or an entire installation from a single point by activating a push button. EPO is employed in many applications such as industrial processes and information technology (IT). This white paper describes the advantages and disadvantages of EPO for protecting data centers and small IT equipment rooms containing UPS systems. Various codes and standards that require EPO are discussed. Recommended practices are suggested for the use of EPO with UPS systems.
Data Centers are a significant investment to the corporations and IT departments who they serve. Whether or not they actually achieve the availability of the design is highly dependent on the quality of the service personnel and their ability to meet the challenges specific to data center management. This paper presents a categorized and prioritized collection of those service challenges and the requirements needed to overcome them. It is based on information obtained in systematic interviews with data center clients and users.
The management of physical infrastructure in data centers can no longer be considered independently of the IT management architecture. In order to manage rapid change and achieve demanded levels of availability while controlling Total Cost of Ownership, IT managers can no longer afford to rely on the primitive, customized management solutions of the past. These solutions are no longer effective and must be replaced by systems based on, and integrated with, open IT management standards. With this in mind, this paper describes the requirements for management of next-generation Network-Critical Physical Infrastructure from the perspective of the ITIL framework.
This note helps explain the differences between Watts and VA and explains how the terms are correctly and incorrectly used in specifying power protection equipment.
Failure to adopt modular standardization as a design strategy for Network-Critical Physical Infrastructure (NCPI) is costly on all fronts: unnecessary expense, avoidable downtime, and lost business opportunity. Standardization and its close relative, modularity, create wideranging benefits in NCPI that streamline and simplify every process from initial planning to daily operation, with significant positive effects on all three major components of NCPI business value – availability, agility, and total cost of ownership.
Description: Failure to adopt modular standardization as a design strategy for Network-Critical Physical Infrastructure (NCPI) is costly on all fronts: unnecessary expense, avoidable downtime, and lost business opportunity. Standardization and its close relative, modularity, create wide-ranging benefits in NCPI that streamline and simplify every process from initial planning to daily operation, with significant positive effects on all three major components of NCPI business value - availability, agility, and total cost of ownership.interpretation.
Description: Mean Time Between Failure is a reliability term used loosely throughout many industries and has become widely abused in some. Over the years the original meaning of this term has been altered which has led to confusion and cynicism. MTBF is largely based on assumptions and definition of failure and attention to these details are paramount to proper interpretation. This paper explains the underlying complexities and misconceptions of MTBF and the methods available for estimating it.
Description: Strategies for choosing a management solution for the physical infrastructure of IT networks, where management of individual devices is necessary to have visibility to the many data points required for reliable operation.
Description: The single largest avoidable cost associated with typical data center and network room infrastructure is oversizing. Learn how you can prevent this unnecessary cost.
Description: Electricity usage costs have become an increasing fraction of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for data centers. Learn how to quantify electricity savings gained through appropriate design of the network-critical physical infrastructure and IT architecture.
Description: Latest generation high/varible density IT equipment it equipment creates conditions that room cooling was never intended to address. Row- and rack-oriented cooling architectures address these issues. Excerpt two offers a comparison of these architectures.
Latest generation high/variable density IT equipment creates conditions that room cooling was never intended to address. Part one reviews room-, row- and rack-based cooling architectures that can address these issues.
High-density servers present a significant challenge. Here is a 10-step approach for cooling efficiency, cooling compactly and power density in existing data centers.
Excerpt of APC white paper #125 discusses strategies for deploying blade servers in existing data centers.
Excerpt of APC white paper #117 discusses network-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI).
Excerpt of APC white paper #102 discusses monitoring physical threats in the data center.