The Importance of Diverse Power in Your Rack

Let’s discuss diverse power into your rack. The question you need to ask yourself when assessing your data center, is how does it get to your rack from the grid? And here are the questions you want to ask. First, where is the Tulsa substation that feeds the power to the data center? Is it onsite, on premise or dedicated to that facility? Or is it located miles away? You want to know this in case of an all-out natural disaster so that you know whether or not your substation that ultimately feeds your rack is going to be effective.

The next question is, how is that substation feeded? Are there diverse power generating sources into that substation? Hopefully so. We want to see, from that substation, that there’s diverse power entries into the building into diverse generator distribution panels. And then, from there, you’ve got A and B side diesel generators in most data centers in tulsa oklahoma. Some use natural gas. But, what you’re looking for is that, from the substation to the distribution panels, now you’ve got diverse generators. This is great because this allows any portion to fail anywhere along the system.

Now the most important thing is how does your rack stay on? Well, in the event of a utility outage, the uninterruptible power supplies that you’re probably used because you probably have one that sits underneath your desk at home or at the office. They are going to hold the load. These are much, much larger and they’re going to hold the load while the generators fire up. Once the generators transfer their power to supply power to the UPSs, now the UPSs are being charged by those generators. And, ultimately, your rack is being powered all the time. You’ve got an A side UPS feed that’s feeding an A side power distribution unit within your rack, and a B side UPS feed that feeds the diverse power supply equipment in your rack.

So, just to recap, we want diverse power supply to the substation, to the distribution panels, to generators that are supplying diverse UPSs that are ultimately supplying diverse power to your PDUs located within your rack.