Today’s infrastructures supporting critical applications need to be flexible, scalable and designed for rapid deployment or upgrades – all while maintaining system availability. The flexibility of a modular architecture enables an organisation to adapt – rapidly – to ever changing requirements. Providing the right kind of scalability is essential when it comes to managing short-term capacity demands – without risking system integrity.
A new breed of modular UPS is now emerging, which is designed to meet central, regional and local data centre challenges by delivering high availability, scalability and serviceability, while optimising design and deployment time. In particular, the rapid repair times associated with the very latest modular configurations can reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) significantly.
At the Data Centre Dynamics conference and exhibition, held in London, a new disruptive, modular UPS solution was presented by Socomec – the Modulys XL, designed to remove any single point of failure.
“By moving to modular UPS, you remove any single point of failure and also reduce fault propagation,’ comments Socomec’s Phil Dunn. “If you have an issue on one board, it cannot transfer throughout the rest of the system and cause a bigger problem. Modular technology means that you can isolate an issue.”
He adds that the technology also reduces risk, as any part of the system can be removed, while the UPS remains live. “In this day and age, you do not want a technician putting their hands into a UPS. Anything that you can do to reduce the intervention time is a benefit to the end user.”
He adds that monolithic systems are labour intensive and costly to maintain – therefore, modular systems offer an advantage from an OPEX perspective.
Phil Dunn believes there is a need to raise awareness of the limitations of technologies, available in the marketplace today, and to improve current understanding of the benefits that modularity can bring.
The second in a series of video interviews, by Mission Critical Power, poses the question: how can the design of modern UPS technology help in preventing failures and optimise maintenance? In this interview, Phil Dunn comments on “what mission critical sites need to know to optimise the performance of their UPS.”
This latest video can be viewed here.
The first in this series of videos, tackles the question: ‘Can next generation UPS increase resilience through modularity?’ To view the full series click here.
