Power management yields green

Look inside a data center and you see servers, switches, routers and sundry other digital gear sucking up a lot of electricity. True. But according to power engineers at Cleveland-based Eaton Corp., all that hardware is only consuming less than a third of your data center's electricity demand. The rest is evenly gobbled up between your HVAC systems and your power management systems.

So, while it is vital that your money-saving green initiatives in the data center continue to focus on more efficient computer and network systems, it is equally important to review the energy efficiencies of the rest of your data center technologies.

One place to start is with your uninterruptible power supply (UPS), says Pedro Robredo, product line manager for Eaton's Power Quality division. He says the company's UPS 9395 825 kVA's transformerless technology is more efficient than UPS with transformers, which squander away kilowatts and take up lots more data center real estate.

Eaton's Fred Miller, product line manager, says combining the UPS 9395 825 and its power distribution unit (a PDU handles power loads for each rack of servers) can get you to 98.5% power efficiency. (As a comparison, electricity flowing across utility grid gets only about 20% efficiency, Miller notes.) He says as server virtualization projects move apace, putting greater demand on each server in a rack, "power per rack is going through the roof" with as much as four-times the power consumption of pre-virtualized racks.

Pricing for the UPS 9395 825 kVA, which begins volume shpments later this month, is implementation specific.