26 September 2018

APT says APC’s rack mounted Smart-UPS Online offered the best fit in terms of the amount of power coverage and runtime.

The University of Stirling has upgraded its data centre power systems with the help of West Yorkshire-based installer and supplier APT (Advanced Power Technology). 

The university currently hosts around 590 servers of which are 84 per cent virtualised, and has recently consolidated from three data centres to two by outsourcing some applications to the cloud.

In recent years, the estate services team have improved the substations serving the campus.

While this has generally helped increase the availability of the data centres, short power losses and brownouts were still being experienced.

At the same time, ageing data centre power infrastructure equipment had been recognised as a potential problem.

While university IT services have never suffered a complete outage thanks to the effectiveness of redundant, distributed IT systems, some of the power equipment had become unreliable and there had been occasional damage to IT equipment.

Replacing the distributed UPS with a centralised, room-sized UPS solution would require too much disruption and expense, so a like-for-like replacement was chosen as the best way forward.

APT won the tender for the contract.

Over the four phases of the upgrade, it installed 44 of APC’s Smart-UPS devices in the two data centres.

This included a mix of 4.5kVA units to protect communications equipment, and 6kVA models to protect servers and storage devices.

Each scalable and rack-mountable UPS provides the university with 6kW of double-conversion online power protection.

They also feature a network management card and APC’s Powerchute network shutdown software for monitoring, control, safe operating system shutdown and energy management.

It’s claimed the software also further safeguards the university from brownouts with proactive, real-time monitoring of UPS performance, and delivers alerts regarding power issues.

Alan Richardson, infrastructure development manager at the university adds: “The installation by APT includes temperature sensors in each rack, something we didn’t have before.

"These are helping us to mitigate the effects of our aircon system by helping identify emerging hotspots so we can deal with them before they become a problem. This wasn’t part of the tender requirement, but is a very useful add-on.”