When Colt Data Centre Services decided to be among the first to manufacture the next generation of modular data centres it turned to Uninterruptible Power Supplies Limited (UPSL), a Kohler company, to provide the efficiency and flexibility it required for its modular power protection. The idea of a rapidly deployed, modular data centre is nothing new; in fact, container-based data centre solutions have been making their presence known for several years, especially since Back then Sun Microsystems introduced project Blackbox, which represented the first containerised facility from a major OEM. In spite of this innovation, the limitations in terms of scalability, internal flexibility and the temporary nature of container based facilities means they are still unsuitable for most organisations’ long-term data centre requirements. The answer therefore, or at least for those who are unable to wait two years for a traditional data centre, would seem to be a third generation of modular data centres. This new incarnation of the modular approach is capable of being constructed and commissioned in a matter of weeks, but most importantly it comes without the limitations of other modular systems and with the advantages of both traditional and container data centres. Colt understood the potential for this new area and has created a separate business division, Colt Data Centre Services, to focus purely on data centre services and deliver a new and totally different solution to the data-centre provision challenges organisations face today. Colt has a long pedigree in this area, owning and operating 19 major data centres across Europe, as well as delivering data centre space to thousands of business customers for more than 15 years – making the company well placed to fully understand the ever changing requirements of its customers. UPS /3/11 Are modular data centres key to meeting your requirements now and in the future? Case Study: Colt Colt Telecommunications Design and installation of a new electrical power including UPS power protection & service PowerWAVE 6000 & 5000/T Uninterruptible Power Supplies Ltd Bacchus House Calleva Park Aldermaston Berkshire RG7 8EN End user: Industry: Scope: Product: Contact: Phone: Web:

Colt Data Centre Services believes a modular hall solution enables its customers to meet almost all of their data centre challenges, using facilities which are fully built and staged before they are transported to a client’s site. From there Colt will install and commission the data centre, delivering a finished product ready for installation of equipment. Alternatively, customers can choose to place their data centre in one of Colt’s own data centres, where build-out technology allows customers to increase their capacity in-line with their requirements, as well as meet any space and power needs, both now and in the future. “Our large-scale, data centre halls are manufactured in approved locations using the latest production line techniques geared to providing the highest quality and high specification data centre halls. Everything is built in-house, using industry leading modular components, before being delivered to site in transportable modules for easy reconstruction. All of this means we are able to cut the time it takes to design and build-out a conventional bespoke data centre by more than two thirds, and can deliver to our customers a complete facility with upwards of 500m2 of data centre space in less than four months, with guaranteed quality and minimal disruption to the site. Compare this to any other system and you can really see why this area of the market is witnessing such strong demand.” Akber Jaffer, general manager at Colt Data Centre Services, commented on why high specification modular data centres are key to the data centre industry’s future: The streamlining of the design and production processes is not the only benefit as Jaffer explains: “The short lead-time is an obvious and huge advantage to clients who are able to get the space and facilities they require in months, rather than years. This also means the technology is still up-to-date and all the associated costs are significantly reduced. But, quality, energy efficiency and total cost of ownership (TCO) are also vital and we have incorporated every inbuilt efficiency possible to make the product more powerful and less expensive to run than any other competitive system. We estimate, based on our own experience, our Modular solution can cut the cost of ownership of a comparable traditional data centre by around 40%”. Power and environmental sustainability have become major issues for every IT department and boardroom across the country and new products are unlikely to enter the marketplace without addressing their energy efficiency credentials. The Data Centre represents one of the largest drains on resources within an organisation, as confirmed in the 2009 Frost and Sullivan report, which claimed that up to 40 percent of a company’s total power could be associated with data centre infrastructure. Colt DCS understood the importance of providing its customers with the smallest carbon footprint and lowest energy draw possible, so turned to the market to find the best third party products available in each area. Finding the right UPS supplier When it came to selecting its UPS partner, Colt DCS had an exacting list of requirements, including class leading efficiency and lowest TCO, as well as a primary need for small physical footprint (see box-out for more detail) in order to optimise its modular design. Neil Ashdown, Chief Infrastructure Architect at Colt DCS picks up the story: “The initial tender process for a UPS supplier saw a few organisations stand out with the capabilities and product range to support the project, but eventually we chose UPSL because of their ability to meet our requirements in every area. All the products UPSL offered were highly energy efficient, three phase UPS systems, with low TCO. We saw these as key considerations for our clients, who need to know the system they are buying into is affordable in the long-term and that ongoing maintenance costs are reasonable”. UPS /3/11

Preventative maintenance means that companies have the reassurance that the UPS will perform to requirements and keep business systems running.“ Preventative maintenance enables Uninterruptible Power Supplies Limited engineers to check system calibrations, evaluate operating conditions, ensure that components are working and to assess the optimum time for their replacement. “Our data centres have been designed to maximise the available space for racks, which included optimising the design for where support equipment - such as power & cooling - is located. With that in mind, we have created support service modules, which are installed at each end of the data centre module (each Colt DC consists of 12 modules which are assembled to create one large, unrestricted data centre hall) and which contain the UPS at one end and all the cooling equipment at the other. This not only ensures we are not using any rack space but also assists cooling. In addition, it also means the cost of ongoing maintenance is reduced – for example, the standardisation of the UPS and cooling modules dramatically reduces the need for spares or engineer training on different systems or sites. On the other hand, this does mean the physical footprint of the UPS is another important consideration.” Each of Colt DCS’s modules is constructed to deliver class leading levels of resilience, at a standard tiering level of Tier 3 overall and Tier 4 for the power infrastructure. This provides a high degree of redundancy throughout the facility, which extends to the chosen UPS system. Each of the initial 12 modules will feature three integrated UPS units, designed to support the critical load and the mechanical load. Each configuration uses two UPSL PowerWAVE 6000s, with a load capacity of 80KVA, working in an N + N redundant formation. The third UPS is the smaller PowerWAVE 5000T, also from UPSL, which supports the mechanical load. The PowerWave6000 three-phase UPS was chosen by Colt for its transformerless design and energy saving inverter switching (ESIS) technology, which delivers best-in-class performance and efficiency; saving valuable floor space and achieving significant TCO savings. In line with Colt’s requirement for a maximum load of 80KVA per module, the PowerWave6000 has a capacity of 60KVA to 200KVA, parallelable up to 2MVA and features exceptionally high operating efficiency – offering 95.5% efficiency from a load of 25% or higher, further reducing power consumption. The UPS also offers low input harmonic distortion (THDi<3.5%) and is blade server friendly – providing fully rated output power to power factors between 0.9 leading and 0.73 lagging. Ashdown further explains the reasons behind Colt’s choice of UPS: “We understand the importance of maintaining a tight control of commissioning costs but ongoing efficiency, TCO and excellent support are even more important to our clients. That’s one of the reasons we went with the UPS system from UPSL, as the chosen products are highly efficient and have a very flat efficiency curve when the load is above 25%, which it always will be, which means the UPS isn’t wasting energy. The PowerWAVE 6000 also has a very small heat build up, which was important due to the confined space in which the UPS is housed”. UPS /3/11

“The other UPS that Colt will be using is the highly compact PowerWAVE 5000T, which is being employed purely to support the mechanical load. I think this is one of the areas where Colt DCS stand out from its competition, who are unlikely to go to support this load as standard.” The PowerWAVE 5000T is a true online, double-conversion ups that provides power protection in a compact format for loads of 7.5kVA to 40kVA. Highly efficient (up to 95%) across a wide load range, the UPS has a small footprint, delivering a power density of up to 86kW/m2 and allowing substantial and valuable space savings even at the highest power ratings. Looking towards the future The relationship between UPSL and Colt, to supply the initial 36 UPS units for the initial proof of concept, fulfilled only the first stage of the project and helped to drive a strong demand for Colt’s modular data centre approach, and the initial concept built for internal Colt use has now been fully productised by Colt DCS and is now offered to the wider commercial market. Ashdown concludes: “We are definitely seeing the large-scale, modular approach as a big growth area for the data centre industry. The idea of spending huge sums to build bespoke data centres -which may never be filled to capacity - is unlikely to continue at the same rate as it has. Far more probable is that upcoming business models such as cloud computing and co-location will drive a different behaviour pattern to data centre procurement, and modularity is likely to be the winning technological approach to the future. All of these options enable a ‘pay as you grow’ approach to capacity, which with costs ever-increasing, represents a far more rational and prudent way to plan for a business’s future.” Contact Uninterruptible Power Supplies Ltd Bacchus House Calleva Park Aldermaston Berkshire RG7 8EN Phone: Web: UPS /3/11