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WHITE PAPER
THE UPS IN DATA CENTERS AND THEIR MAIN FEATURES
CONTINUITY
Investing in a UPS system is worth whenever the UPS TCO is lower than the overall costs associated with business
interruption. Continuity is therefore paramount in Data Centers, since even the shortest operations breakdown would
mean huge losses in terms of not processed or “lost” data and hardware permanent damage. Minor mains disturbances,
such as voltage sags and swells, micro-interruptions and flickers, can cause severe damage to data and servers in the
long term, as well, with consequent breakdowns for failures and repairs.
How UPS improves continuity:
Installing a UPS system in a power supply line greatly helps business
continuity by filtering mains disturbances and outages; it also
provides clean power to critical loads as servers or other privileged
equipment. Depending on the type of operation, protection can
be modulated from total (VFI - online double conversion mode)
to moderate (VI - line interactive mode) to light (ECO mode). The
choice of the operation mode is strictly related to the efficiency of
the system and relevant energy consumption.
In general, more is the protection less is the efficiency.
While VFI total protection is by far preferred, especially in
colocation, VI or ECO lower protection is sometimes accepted in
self-owned DC’s, to trade off for slightly higher efficiency. In any
case the balance between protection and energy savings it to be
evaluated properly valuated accordingly with the situation, for
instance, ECO mode could be useful to reduce unused energy
consumption during maintenance periods and use VFI mode when
the Servers and other active loads are in full operation.
