There seems to be no end to the growth and expansion of data centers, and with that growth comes a corresponding increase in power consumption. So much so, that global analytics company The 451 Group estimates that energy is 30% of the operating cost of a data center over a 15-year lifetime.
And that’s after a wave of server virtualization and other technology upgrades have been installed in order to reduce energy consumption. The Uptime Institute’s 2013 Data Center Report states that power usage effectiveness (PUE), the leading metric for data center power efficiency, has plateaued. The report concludes, “The biggest infrastructure efficiency gains happened five years ago.”
So how does today’s data center manager reduce energy consumption? With virtualization and low-power processor activities exhausted, many forward-looking data center operators are considering using DC-power distribution schemes instead of traditional AC power uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and distribution.
DC power distribution is an untapped and significant source of power savings resulting from a reduction in wasteful power conversions. In a typical data center, AC power from mains enters the facility passing through an AC uninterruptible power supply (UPS), which converts it to DC to charge batteries, then inverts it back to AC to distribute to the equipment racks and other load. It is there that the power is converted to DC a second time. Each time conversion occurs there is a loss of energy.
With DC distribution, power is converted to DC at the mains, and then is distributed to each rack and to the battery back up were the only further conversion necessary is a DC-DC voltage reduction, which can be done using high-efficiency technology. The advantage is a dramatic reduction in conversion and inversion steps and thus less power wasted in the entire process.
How One Co-Location Center Switched to DC Power
One example of this data center DC distribution is a co-location data center in Asia whose owner wanted to reduce power consumption and decided to replace the AC infrastructure with an innovative, high availability 1 MW DC power system that will be phased in during 2014 and be totally deployed during 2015.
source: http://www.powerpulse.net/powerViews.php?pv_id=70
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