Innovations in UPS Systems
Uninterruptible power supply technology has undergone transformative changes in the past three years, as information technology (IT) managers struggle with ever-increasing, data-handling demands and increasing energy expenses.
These pressures have produced consolidations in the UPS industry as companies have realized that growth will come only by combining, through acquisitions, IT infrastructure, and UPS systems, to provide customers with the one-stop solutions they are demanding. The UPS industry, with us since the days of mainframes in the 1950s, is now serving a huge, world-wide, trillion-dollar market. IDC, a global market intelligence firm, estimates the data center market, acknowledged to be the biggest for UPSs, is a $55 billion market. According to the business research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, UPS business worldwide had revenues of $6.5 billion in 2006.
 |
Photo: Liebert Global Services |
| A Liebert NX System |
The big three UPC manufacturers, APC, Liebert, and Powerware, have all been acquired and integrated into billion-dollar electrical, technology, or industrial process firms to serve what is acknowledged to be a diversifying market. All have retained their strong brand names, and have developed products linking their UPS systems to IT infrastructure components, in concert with affiliates and parent companies. Consolidation was also driven by market pressure to produce economies of scale in the face of rising prices for lead, steel, and copper.
APC, headquartered in West Kingston, RI, reported revenues of $2 billion from its UPS business in 2006, out of a total of $12 billion, which included sales of racks, the building blocks for servers and precision cooling, monitors, and humidity controls. It was acquired by the European company Schneider in early 2007, which had already acquired MGE UPS Systems. Dave Wyman, a senior marketing analyst for APC, quoting a Frost & Sullivan survey, says the company has a 38.5% market share.
Powerware was acquired by Eaton Corp., headquartered in Cleveland, OH, from Invensys in 2004 for $560 million. Eaton is a diversified company, with revenues of $7 billion in 2006. At the time of the sale, Powerware was rated by Frost & Sullivan as the number one vendor in UPS systems above 5 kVA, and number 2, at or below, 5 kVA.
Eaton announced, in December 2007, it was acquiring The Moeller Group, a building components supplier and Phoenixtec Power Co., a Japanese UPS manufacturer. Both have strong distribution systems in Europe, Asia, and Eastern Europe. In June 2007, it bought the small systems business unit of MGE UPS Systems for $612 million from Schneider, which agreed to sell it when it acquired APC at the insistence of the European Union to avoid concerns over market power.
Liebert was acquired by Emerson, an electronics and telecommunications company, in 1994. Emerson had sales of $20.1 billion in 2006, up from $14 billion in 2003. Emerson acquired Cooligy, a developer and manufacturer of active cooling technology for microprocessors and other heat-generating components, in October 2005. In January 2006, it acquired Knurr AG of Germany. Knurr manufactures server and network racks and climate control systems including a high-density cooling system, among other IT infrastructure.
Chloride Power Protection Co., based in the UK and specializing in power protection solutions, nine years ago acquired ONEAC Corp., a US company, in business since 1979. Today, Chloride markets UPS products under both the ONEAC and Chloride brand names. Chloride is considerably smaller than the other companies, and focuses its marketing on retail, medical, IT, and telecom applications.
View of Today’s Industry
Robert Walker is a senior applications engineer at JT Packard. It is a third-party, nationwide service company that sells and services all brands of new and refurbished UPS systems, including the top three UPS product lines. Walker says both Mitsubishi and General Electric, which entered the field by acquiring Swiss company IMV, are also strong players.
Mitsubishi produces one of the top-quality systems, Walker says, but does not invest much in marketing. Its systems are heavily engineered, and the initial costs of a Mitsubishi UPS will be higher than a Powerware system, he says, but its life cycle costs will be lower, because it is very reliable. He based that observation on the number of emergency service calls Packard gets for the machines. “We’ll be lucky to see one in 100 for Mitsubishi,” he says.
Walker sees two trends in the industry. First, more and more people are talking about the total cost of a system, rather than individual components. They want UPSs that run more efficiently and reliably, and use less power and air conditioning. Second, competition for service contracts is picking up. Some manufacturers, such as Mitsubishi and GE, use third-party services, but the big three manufacturers require customers to use their factory services.
The result is higher costs. If Packard sells a UPS manufactured by one of the big three, its service contract will be for 90% to 95% of the cost, and it will have to hire the manufacturer’s service arm to complete remaining repairs. Packard will pass the manufacturer’s service charge through, thereby increasing the customer’s service cost.
JT Packard saw equipment sales doubling in the last year and revenues are up, Walker says. The majority of its business is with data centers, all the way from small “mom and pop” businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Service is 25% of the business with the latter, he says. The company does see some business from industrials where a UPS may be used to backup power supplies for a process line, but this business is small. However, in this application, the UPS will have a longer lifetime, because the technology growth or innovation does not occur at the speed it does in a data center. The call for service will come, because the UPS is sitting in the shop floor where it is sucking up metal shavings that short circuits circuit boards, says Walker.
Chris Loeffler, product manager in Eaton’s Electrical Group where Powerware resides, agreed with Walker. IT is the biggest industry, and UPS replacement is fairly slow for industrial applications where UPSs are heavy duty and have long lives if they have service contracts—15 to 20 years as opposed to a typical three-year lifetime in data center settings.
UPS Pricing Discussed
Walker says the top price for a UPS alone, without batteries, is about $1 per kilovolt-amp. Due to economies of scale, a 480-V system cost will go down to $0.50 per kilovolt-amp, while a 208-V system will run between $0.80 and $1 per kilovolt-amp.
Aaron Davis, senior vice president of marketing at APC, agrees, for the most part. A medium-sized UPS up to about 5 kVA for a small business will cost a little less than $1 per kilovolt-amp, or $5,000, he says. A data center will need a UPS system sized from 80 kVA to 2 MW. People prefer to buy several small modular UPS systems, he says. The cost of an integrated power protection system, including cooling and software could grow to $100,000.
Loeffler put the cost of a small 5- or 6-kVA system in a doctor’s office or small data room at $1,500 to $2,000, excluding installation costs. Moving up to a medium-sized business like a retail chain, a 10- to 20-kW three-phase system will run between $15,000 and $20,000. (Loeffler said system sizes are now often being described in terms of kilowatts, rather than kilovolt-amps.) UPS systems sized at 1 MW for big 10,000-square-foot data centers are starting at $400,000, with installation and labor costs running between $100,000 and $300,000. These data centers typically use 100 W to 150 W per square foot, Loeffler says. Loeffler says Eaton Powerware does a lot of business in the medical field. UPS systems are attached to such medical equipment as CAT Scans, x-ray machines, and in mobile applications. For example, a $2 million piece of medical equipment will be backed up with a $30,000 UPS. He says medical equipment manufacturers have found that maintenance and replacement costs are lower when UPS systems are attached to this expensive equipment.
Innovation Changed the Industry
UPS design technology with its bank of batteries hadn’t changed since its beginning, according to APC’s Aaron Davis. But then, energy got expensive and data centers started becoming larger, more complex, and generating more heat. Research and development in the past few years produced both UPS and server systems that could be modularized—essentially right-sizing the infrastructure of the data center to the IT load, in response to IT managers’ demands to provide solutions to their problems.
“Factory floors and data centers asked for what they needed now and the ability to scale it up as they need more capacity,” Davis says. However, servers were operating at one-third capacity, and redundant UPS systems running at 30% load created a power drain. Furthermore, companies were paying for air conditioning to remove the heat being generated by unneeded capacity.
Efficiency Now Matters
A UPS’s efficiency is always listed by the manufacturer as if the system is operating at 100% load. But, everyone in the industry agrees that UPSs never operate at 100% load. Most UPSs operate at an average load of 30% in medium- to large-scale data centers. A typical efficiency at that load is 89%. In cases where a data center uses redundant UPSs, the load is split between the two, bringing the efficiency down to 82%. A 10% load will have an efficiency of 50%. The lower the efficiency, the greater will be the energy loss and increased power costs.
A UPS also experiences no-load losses as the result of power use by its transformers, capacitors, logic boards, and communication cards. Additional losses can be attributed to processing the power when adding load (known as processing losses) and an increase in electrical current running through components as load is added (known as square-law losses). But, the greatest losses are attributed to not accounting for reduced loads.
APC white paper #108, “Making Large UPS Systems More Efficient” (available at www.apc.com), compared two 1-MW UPS systems from different manufacturers to illustrate that not all UPS systems are equal and the implications for power costs. Manufacturers of both systems published identical efficiencies of 93% at full load. For illustration purposes, APC assumed they operated in a redundant architecture, meaning two UPSs in each system are each carrying half the load. Assuming an electrical cost of $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, and a data center load of 300 kW, the two UPS systems are operating at 30% load. Electrical losses are $20,940 annually for one system, and $56,644 annually for the second. Annual cooling costs to remove waste heat from the systems are $8,376 and $22,651, respectively, assuming each kilowatt requires 400 W for the cooling system to remove it.
Chuck Heller, product marketing manager for Chloride Power Protection, says its UPSs sold in Europe, have considerably higher efficiencies than those it sells in the North American market, because the acceptance of technology here has been slower. The simpler, less-efficient line-interactive UPSs have been more popular, based on cost, he says. Chloride does intend to introduce the more energy-efficient models into the North American market in the near future, he says.
Improving Efficiency
UPS system efficiency has been improved through technology, topology, and modularity. UPS systems work by converting the incoming utility power’s alternating current to direct current and direct current back to alternating current before it exits to the plug strip or server. The UPS cleans up the power, eliminating voltage spikes and other electrical impurities. The switching process has traditionally been accomplished using silicon-controlled rectifiers which have high power/high voltage switching capabilities.
In the mid-1990s isolated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) were introduced and they require less power to turn on and off. Furthermore, the power conversion process can be operated in a “high-frequency, pulse-width-modulation mode” that reduces the size of filter components leading to greater efficiencies.
Another technological improvement has been to adopt digital signal processing, thereby moving away from analog controls. Advanced DSP controls improve efficiency through intelligent adaptive switching, and they require much less power than earlier generation controls, thereby reducing no-load losses.
Topology refers to the internal design of the UPS system. A 2006 publication by the Electric Power Research Institute found that for high-power UPS systems a delta conversion online topology offers the greatest efficiency. A delta transformer allows utility power to flow directly through the UPS to the server or other application, and also through the delta converter and main inverter to the server, or to the battery for storage. Efficiency is improved by reducing no-load losses and by a reduction in square-law losses. The typical double conversion online UPS, on the other hand, directs all power through a rectifier, then through the inverter, and on to the server or to the battery for storage, making it less efficient.
In the white paper referenced earlier, APC calculated that, over a 10-year period, with a 300-kW load, a delta conversion UPS would operate at 94.9% efficiency, and reduce energy costs by 58%, compared with a double conversion UPS operating at 88.7% efficiency.
APC also calculated that a delta conversion right-sized system for a 300-kW load would reduce power costs 75%, or $351,279, over a 10-year period in comparison to an oversized double-conversion, non-scalable UPS with no redundancy. These UPS systems and others are described in detail in APC white paper number one, “The Different Types of UPS Systems,” also available on its Web site.
Modularity allows users to size the UPS system as closely to the load as practicable. Blade servers are an IT technology innovation that illustrates the concept. Having replaced tower servers, blade servers are essentially large cards that can be slipped into racks as new server capacity is needed. A customer can buy the frame and install the blades to achieve the amount of processing he or she requires. The more blades, the more powerful the server becomes.
Chris Loeffler, with Eaton, explains that one blade server will replace 20 tower servers, and take up half the space, but its power demands are three to five times higher. An innocent IT manager would plug the new blade servers into a plug strip, and immediately overload the power distribution system. The implication for UPS systems was they needed to be more flexible. Eaton’s research and development created a more flexible modular Powerware UPS product. If the customer buys a 40-kVA UPS he can upgrade to an 80-kVA system with 10-kVA building blocks, for example, since the company’s “Firmware” software is built into the UPS.
Emerson’s Network Power unit introduced a new Liebert NX UPS with “Softscale” technology with an efficiency rating up to 97% in October 2007. Designed for small- and medium-size data centers facing unpredictable changes in their IT systems, this system can be scaled with a simple software key. Modules can adapt from 40 kVA to 60 kVA to 80 kVA, or from 80 kVA to 100 kVA to 120 kVA. Furthermore, modules with different ratings can work in parallel to handle higher capacities, such as 80-kVA and 120-kVA models working together to support 200 kVA of equipment.
Server virtualization is another innovation giving UPS systems more flexibility and the ability to downsize. Virtualization is software that allows IT managers to shut off parts of servers that are not being used (among other reasons). This again cuts down the amount of UPS capacity needed. If virtualization is not accounted for, the data center’s UPS could be drawing full power, but operating at 10% capacity, reducing efficiency to 50%. If not downsized, the UPS becomes an energy sponge, in Davis’s words, sucking up cooling to remove its heat. These innovations have fed consolidations of UPS manufacturers into larger companies that can integrate all of a data center’s infrastructure components, including UPS systems to create smarter products.
As Davis tells the story, this happened because customers started asking vendors, “You’ve sold me these UPSs, they generate heat, can’t you integrate the power cooling and UPS capacity so my energy costs are reduced?” Customers also asked, “I have to put in new blade servers, but I don’t know where to put the UPS.”
Downsize to Right Size
| So right-sizing the data center’s infrastructure to fit the IT load has become the new business model for manufacturers that built their businesses selling UPS systems. Managers traditionally used the “circle the wagon” designs: put the IT equipment in the middle of the room and circle it with air conditioning. The air conditioning had to travel 60 feet to get to the heat source, but with power now being so expensive a new philosophy of containment has taken over. Don’t let hot air and cold air mix—take out the hot air at its source.
After two years of research and development, Davis says APC launched “capacity management software,” which allows it to take a patented architecture, called InfraStruXure Hot-Aisle Containment Systems, to bring precision cooling systems directly into the aisles of racks. Hot waste air is removed from one side, and cooling is delivered to the opposite side of the racks.
Davis explained the InfraStrucXure software sits on top of an aisle rack and monitors how much power and cooling is being used and what is required for the installed IT equipment. This software can also predict where new equipment will be needed and tell IT managers which rack to put it in.
For example, APC designed a portion of Sun Microsystems new energy-efficient data center in Santa Clara, CA. It provided Sun with 18 InfraStruXure Hot Aisle Containment Systems, and Sun installed three APC 800-kW uninterruptible UPS systems across two lab buildings. This Symmetra megawatt model scales from 400 kW to 1.6 MW, and offers up to 97% efficiency. Over the 10-year lifetime of the three UPS systems, energy savings could exceed $1 million, according to APC. Eaton also offers an energy efficient UPS system. Cutter & Buck, headquartered in Seattle, WA, designs and markets upscale sportswear and outerwear, which is sold primarily through golf pro shops and resorts, corporate accounts, and specialty retail accounts. It receives orders, packs, and ships thousands of units daily, and depends on a state-of-the-art distribution center and computer system that supports real-time ordering, product status, and history.
After suffering two product failures caused by power irregularities when the UPS did not provide backup power, the company realized it needed a completely different UPS architecture to improve total system availability. The company purchased two 12-kW Powerware BladeUPS modules, configured to run in parallel, and four extended-battery models, set in a single Powerware rack. The system has the flexibility of expanding from 12 kW to 60 kW, in a single 19-inch enclosure. Furthermore, each UPS module operates independently, and is completely synchronized with the other modules. In other words, there is no central main controller with backup, so, in the case of a power blackout, there is no change in control nor a single point of failure.
In the case of power failure, the company’s IBMAS400 systems can take up to 20 minutes to perform an orderly shutdown, if necessary. With Powerware BladeUPS communications capability, alarms can be sent to warn of declining power levels and to trigger an orderly shutdown if power is not restored in a timely manner.
Liebert delivered a UPS and precision cooling system to the Tuscany Casino, while still under construction in Las Vegas, NV, for its digital surveillance system. Traditionally, casinos relied on a taped security camera system, which requires swapping tapes every eight hours and maintaining a seven-day archive. The new digital surveillance system would eliminate that labor-intensive work, but it required a secure IT infrastructure. If the surveillance system goes down, the casino must cease revenue-generating gaming activities.
When Data Center Associates, a technical and environmental infrastructure design company, reviewed the original plans for the data center, they found the UPS was oversized and the data center space was undersized. Furthermore, the building air conditioners were specified for environmental control, rather than the precision units typically used in data center applications. The design was overhauled, tripling the size of the data center and mounting all equipment in racks. The UPS was downsized from 185 kVA to a Liebert 65-kVA Npower, with 45 minutes of battery capacity, double-conversion, online technology, and a maintenance bypass. The casino owners had to be convinced to substitute precision cooling for the building air conditioners, and the Liebert Deluxe Series 3 was installed to provide the precision cooling, air filtration, and humidity control. Furthermore, the IT systems had to be tested before utility power was available, and the Liebert UPS conditioned power from two temporary generators during the installation process.
The acquisition of ONEAC Corp., by Chloride Power Protection Co. allowed it to expand into the North American market. As mentioned earlier, Chloride markets UPS systems under both its and ONEAC’s names. ONEAC manufactures small, single-phase, line-interactive UPS systems, ranging in size from 250 VA to 3 kVA. In line interactive systems, the transfer switch, which opens when input power fails, is in direct line to the inverter. Power flow is then transferred to battery backup. This is most commonly the design used for small retail businesses, IT, and telecom applications.
 |
Photo: APC |
| APCs InfrastruXure |
ONEAC also offers single-phase, double-conversion, online systems sized from 700 VA to 20 kVA. The double conversion online system, commonly used for larger loads, is designed such that input AC failure does not activate the transfer switch, since input power flows directly through the rectifier and inverter while charging the backup battery. All of ONEAC’s UPS systems include power conditioning to protect loads from power spikes, surges, and other interferences.
In North America, Chloride currently offers three-phase, double-conversion UPS systems sized from 10 kVA to 750 kVA in single modules, many of which can be paralleled for redundancy or additional capacity. It also offers another group of systems sized from 10 kVA to 75 kVA, that are designed for UL924 emergency lighting applications in single-module applications that cannot be paralleled.
Chloride’s North American three-phase UPSs currently have efficiencies up to 93.8%, depending on size and voltage configuration, according to Chloride product marketing manager Chuck Heller. The larger units have fairly consistent efficiencies down to below 50% load. As to costs, he said it all depends on how much backup the customer wants, the size of the unit, and whether redundancy is required. He estimated a large-scale (over 500 kVA) single-module system with 10-minute battery backup would cost around $300 per kVA. The cost of the battery is nearly half of that and increases with runtime.
Typical applications for an ONEAC system include Gooding’s Supermarket in central Florida. The area’s harsh storms, accompanied by heavy lightning, were playing havoc with the store’s systems, causing terminals to lose contact with remote printers and rendering touch screens unresponsive. Data became garbled, and communications between different parts of the network slowed down or ceased. Once the ONEAC power-conditioned UPS system was installed, it absorbed the potentially destructive transients, and the supermarket has experienced no power-related problems since then.
The Birmingham (AL) Public Library also experienced devastating and expensive hits by power surges and lightning strikes to its information network connecting 40 remote locations. The library installed ONEAC’s On Series UPS with power conditioner, and online communication line protectors. Later, following another power surge that destroyed a television set, terminal, and other equipment, the information systems equipment protected by the UPS was saved.
Can UPS and DG Be Partners?
Heller suggests that facilities with onsite generation could use a UPS in the transition period between a power failure and the startup, or restart of the generation system. His advice to companies that have some type of onsite generation is that all critical applications should be protected by UPSs. Robert Walker, with JT Packard, says the newest UPS systems are very compatible with generation equipment being used to generate additional power or as backup systems.
He explained the new digital IGBT—isolated gate bipolar transistor—which is the heart and soul of a UPS’s inverter. In combination with digital signal processors, it reduces the number of components and increases reliability. Moreover, these digital components reduce total harmonic distortion, accept all qualities of power, and make the UPS operate more compatibly with generators.
Rich Zajkowski, with Emerson Network Power, was a bit more specific. He reported that new power generation technologies, including gas and diesel generators, require special consideration when a UPS is installed. Some UPS technologies treat utility power differently than when they draw power from the generator. These differences sometimes result in the need to oversize the generator capacity in order to work properly with a UPS.
Advertisement
Other UPS designs incorporate technology that allows the UPS and generator capacity to be more closely matched. When matching a generator and a UPS, it is best to confer with the manufacturers of both the generator and the UPS. Zajkowski outlined some of the UPS design considerations that should be taken into account when matching a UPS with a generator:
- Is the UPS power factor corrected?
- If so, does it use a high-frequency conversion stage or a SCR-based converter?
- What is the input harmonic profile of the UPS?
- Can the UPS input power factor lead under any load or line condition? (This could be a problem with some
generators.) - What is the type of load and the range of load that can be expected to be placed on the generator, in terms of kilowatts
and kilovolt-amps? - What loads are connected to the same UPS?
- What is the additional load represented by the UPS battery charger?
- Can the UPS battery charger be automatically turned off or throttled back when the generator is supplying power?
To learn more about the companies reviewed here, and read the case studies they’ve included, one can visit these Web sites: www.apc.com; www.powerware.com; www.liebert.com, www.jtpackard.com, www.oneac.com, and www.chlorideups.com.
Author's Bio: California-based Lyn Corum is a technical writer specializing in energy topics.
May-June 2008
Innovations in UPS Systems
Uninterruptible power supply technology has undergone transformative changes in the past three years, as information technology (IT) managers struggle with ever-increasing, data-handling demands and increasing energy expenses.
These pressures have produced consolidations in the UPS industry as companies have realized that growth will come only by combining, through acquisitions, IT infrastructure, and UPS systems, to provide customers with the one-stop solutions they are demanding. The UPS industry, with us since the days of mainframes in the 1950s, is now serving a huge, world-wide, trillion-dollar market. IDC, a global market intelligence firm, estimates the data center market, acknowledged to be the biggest for UPSs, is a $55 billion market. According to the business research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, UPS business worldwide had revenues of $6.5 billion in 2006.
| |
Photo: Liebert Global Services |
| A Liebert NX System |
The big three UPC manufacturers, APC, Liebert, and Powerware, have all been acquired and integrated into billion-dollar electrical, technology, or industrial process firms to serve what is acknowledged to be a diversifying market. All have retained their strong brand names, and have developed products linking their UPS systems to IT infrastructure components, in concert with affiliates and parent companies. Consolidation was also driven by market pressure to produce economies of scale in the face of rising prices for lead, steel, and copper.
APC, headquartered in West Kingston, RI, reported revenues of $2 billion from its UPS business in 2006, out of a total of $12 billion, which included sales of racks, the building blocks for servers and precision cooling, monitors, and humidity controls. It was acquired by the European company Schneider in early 2007, which had already acquired MGE UPS Systems. Dave Wyman, a senior marketing analyst for APC, quoting a Frost & Sullivan survey, says the company has a 38.5% market share.
Powerware was acquired by Eaton Corp., headquartered in Cleveland, OH, from Invensys in 2004 for $560 million. Eaton is a diversified company, with revenues of $7 billion in 2006. At the time of the sale, Powerware was rated by Frost & Sullivan as the number one vendor in UPS systems above 5 kVA, and number 2, at or below, 5 kVA.
Eaton announced, in December 2007, it was acquiring The Moeller Group, a building components supplier and Phoenixtec Power Co., a Japanese UPS manufacturer. Both have strong distribution systems in Europe, Asia, and Eastern Europe. In June 2007, it bought the small systems business unit of MGE UPS Systems for $612 million from Schneider, which agreed to sell it when it acquired APC at the insistence of the European Union to avoid concerns over market power.
Liebert was acquired by Emerson, an electronics and telecommunications company, in 1994. Emerson had sales of $20.1 billion in 2006, up from $14 billion in 2003. Emerson acquired Cooligy, a developer and manufacturer of active cooling technology for microprocessors and other heat-generating components, in October 2005. In January 2006, it acquired Knurr AG of Germany. Knurr manufactures server and network racks and climate control systems including a high-density cooling system, among other IT infrastructure.
Chloride Power Protection Co., based in the UK and specializing in power protection solutions, nine years ago acquired ONEAC Corp., a US company, in business since 1979. Today, Chloride markets UPS products under both the ONEAC and Chloride brand names. Chloride is considerably smaller than the other companies, and focuses its marketing on retail, medical, IT, and telecom applications.
View of Today’s Industry
Robert Walker is a senior applications engineer at JT Packard. It is a third-party, nationwide service company that sells and services all brands of new and refurbished UPS systems, including the top three UPS product lines. Walker says both Mitsubishi and General Electric, which entered the field by acquiring Swiss company IMV, are also strong players.
Mitsubishi produces one of the top-quality systems, Walker says, but does not invest much in marketing. Its systems are heavily engineered, and the initial costs of a Mitsubishi UPS will be higher than a Powerware system, he says, but its life cycle costs will be lower, because it is very reliable. He based that observation on the number of emergency service calls Packard gets for the machines. “We’ll be lucky to see one in 100 for Mitsubishi,” he says.
Walker sees two trends in the industry. First, more and more people are talking about the total cost of a system, rather than individual components. They want UPSs that run more efficiently and reliably, and use less power and air conditioning. Second, competition for service contracts is picking up. Some manufacturers, such as Mitsubishi and GE, use third-party services, but the big three manufacturers require customers to use their factory services.
The result is higher costs. If Packard sells a UPS manufactured by one of the big three, its service contract will be for 90% to 95% of the cost, and it will have to hire the manufacturer’s service arm to complete remaining repairs. Packard will pass the manufacturer’s service charge through, thereby increasing the customer’s service cost.
JT Packard saw equipment sales doubling in the last year and revenues are up, Walker says. The majority of its business is with data centers, all the way from small “mom and pop” businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Service is 25% of the business with the latter, he says. The company does see some business from industrials where a UPS may be used to backup power supplies for a process line, but this business is small. However, in this application, the UPS will have a longer lifetime, because the technology growth or innovation does not occur at the speed it does in a data center. The call for service will come, because the UPS is sitting in the shop floor where it is sucking up metal shavings that short circuits circuit boards, says Walker.
Chris Loeffler, product manager in Eaton’s Electrical Group where Powerware resides, agreed with Walker. IT is the biggest industry, and UPS replacement is fairly slow for industrial applications where UPSs are heavy duty and have long lives if they have service contracts—15 to 20 years as opposed to a typical three-year lifetime in data center settings.
UPS Pricing Discussed
Walker says the top price for a UPS alone, without batteries, is about $1 per kilovolt-amp. Due to economies of scale, a 480-V system cost will go down to $0.50 per kilovolt-amp, while a 208-V system will run between $0.80 and $1 per kilovolt-amp.
Aaron Davis, senior vice president of marketing at APC, agrees, for the most part. A medium-sized UPS up to about 5 kVA for a small business will cost a little less than $1 per kilovolt-amp, or $5,000, he says. A data center will need a UPS system sized from 80 kVA to 2 MW. People prefer to buy several small modular UPS systems, he says. The cost of an integrated power protection system, including cooling and software could grow to $100,000.
Loeffler put the cost of a small 5- or 6-kVA system in a doctor’s office or small data room at $1,500 to $2,000, excluding installation costs. Moving up to a medium-sized business like a retail chain, a 10- to 20-kW three-phase system will run between $15,000 and $20,000. (Loeffler said system sizes are now often being described in terms of kilowatts, rather than kilovolt-amps.) UPS systems sized at 1 MW for big 10,000-square-foot data centers are starting at $400,000, with installation and labor costs running between $100,000 and $300,000. These data centers typically use 100 W to 150 W per square foot, Loeffler says. Loeffler says Eaton Powerware does a lot of business in the medical field. UPS systems are attached to such medical equipment as CAT Scans, x-ray machines, and in mobile applications. For example, a $2 million piece of medical equipment will be backed up with a $30,000 UPS. He says medical equipment manufacturers have found that maintenance and replacement costs are lower when UPS systems are attached to this expensive equipment.
Innovation Changed the Industry
UPS design technology with its bank of batteries hadn’t changed since its beginning, according to APC’s Aaron Davis. But then, energy got expensive and data centers started becoming larger, more complex, and generating more heat. Research and development in the past few years produced both UPS and server systems that could be modularized—essentially right-sizing the infrastructure of the data center to the IT load, in response to IT managers’ demands to provide solutions to their problems.
“Factory floors and data centers asked for what they needed now and the ability to scale it up as they need more capacity,” Davis says. However, servers were operating at one-third capacity, and redundant UPS systems running at 30% load created a power drain. Furthermore, companies were paying for air conditioning to remove the heat being generated by unneeded capacity.
Efficiency Now Matters
A UPS’s efficiency is always listed by the manufacturer as if the system is operating at 100% load. But, everyone in the industry agrees that UPSs never operate at 100% load. Most UPSs operate at an average load of 30% in medium- to large-scale data centers. A typical efficiency at that load is 89%. In cases where a data center uses redundant UPSs, the load is split between the two, bringing the efficiency down to 82%. A 10% load will have an efficiency of 50%. The lower the efficiency, the greater will be the energy loss and increased power costs.
A UPS also experiences no-load losses as the result of power use by its transformers, capacitors, logic boards, and communication cards. Additional losses can be attributed to processing the power when adding load (known as processing losses) and an increase in electrical current running through components as load is added (known as square-law losses). But, the greatest losses are attributed to not accounting for reduced loads.
APC white paper #108, “Making Large UPS Systems More Efficient” (available at www.apc.com), compared two 1-MW UPS systems from different manufacturers to illustrate that not all UPS systems are equal and the implications for power costs. Manufacturers of both systems published identical efficiencies of 93% at full load. For illustration purposes, APC assumed they operated in a redundant architecture, meaning two UPSs in each system are each carrying half the load. Assuming an electrical cost of $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, and a data center load of 300 kW, the two UPS systems are operating at 30% load. Electrical losses are $20,940 annually for one system, and $56,644 annually for the second. Annual cooling costs to remove waste heat from the systems are $8,376 and $22,651, respectively, assuming each kilowatt requires 400 W for the cooling system to remove it.
Chuck Heller, product marketing manager for Chloride Power Protection, says its UPSs sold in Europe, have considerably higher efficiencies than those it sells in the North American market, because the acceptance of technology here has been slower. The simpler, less-efficient line-interactive UPSs have been more popular, based on cost, he says. Chloride does intend to introduce the more energy-efficient models into the North American market in the near future, he says.
Improving Efficiency
UPS system efficiency has been improved through technology, topology, and modularity. UPS systems work by converting the incoming utility power’s alternating current to direct current and direct current back to alternating current before it exits to the plug strip or server. The UPS cleans up the power, eliminating voltage spikes and other electrical impurities. The switching process has traditionally been accomplished using silicon-controlled rectifiers which have high power/high voltage switching capabilities.
In the mid-1990s isolated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) were introduced and they require less power to turn on and off. Furthermore, the power conversion process can be operated in a “high-frequency, pulse-width-modulation mode” that reduces the size of filter components leading to greater efficiencies.
Another technological improvement has been to adopt digital signal processing, thereby moving away from analog controls. Advanced DSP controls improve efficiency through intelligent adaptive switching, and they require much less power than earlier generation controls, thereby reducing no-load losses.
Topology refers to the internal design of the UPS system. A 2006 publication by the Electric Power Research Institute found that for high-power UPS systems a delta conversion online topology offers the greatest efficiency. A delta transformer allows utility power to flow directly through the UPS to the server or other application, and also through the delta converter and main inverter to the server, or to the battery for storage. Efficiency is improved by reducing no-load losses and by a reduction in square-law losses. The typical double conversion online UPS, on the other hand, directs all power through a rectifier, then through the inverter, and on to the server or to the battery for storage, making it less efficient.
In the white paper referenced earlier, APC calculated that, over a 10-year period, with a 300-kW load, a delta conversion UPS would operate at 94.9% efficiency, and reduce energy costs by 58%, compared with a double conversion UPS operating at 88.7% efficiency.
APC also calculated that a delta conversion right-sized system for a 300-kW load would reduce power costs 75%, or $351,279, over a 10-year period in comparison to an oversized double-conversion, non-scalable UPS with no redundancy. These UPS systems and others are described in detail in APC white paper number one, “The Different Types of UPS Systems,” also available on its Web site.
Modularity allows users to size the UPS system as closely to the load as practicable. Blade servers are an IT technology innovation that illustrates the concept. Having replaced tower servers, blade servers are essentially large cards that can be slipped into racks as new server capacity is needed. A customer can buy the frame and install the blades to achieve the amount of processing he or she requires. The more blades, the more powerful the server becomes.
Chris Loeffler, with Eaton, explains that one blade server will replace 20 tower servers, and take up half the space, but its power demands are three to five times higher. An innocent IT manager would plug the new blade servers into a plug strip, and immediately overload the power distribution system. The implication for UPS systems was they needed to be more flexible. Eaton’s research and development created a more flexible modular Powerware UPS product. If the customer buys a 40-kVA UPS he can upgrade to an 80-kVA system with 10-kVA building blocks, for example, since the company’s “Firmware” software is built into the UPS.
Emerson’s Network Power unit introduced a new Liebert NX UPS with “Softscale” technology with an efficiency rating up to 97% in October 2007. Designed for small- and medium-size data centers facing unpredictable changes in their IT systems, this system can be scaled with a simple software key. Modules can adapt from 40 kVA to 60 kVA to 80 kVA, or from 80 kVA to 100 kVA to 120 kVA. Furthermore, modules with different ratings can work in parallel to handle higher capacities, such as 80-kVA and 120-kVA models working together to support 200 kVA of equipment.
Server virtualization is another innovation giving UPS systems more flexibility and the ability to downsize. Virtualization is software that allows IT managers to shut off parts of servers that are not being used (among other reasons). This again cuts down the amount of UPS capacity needed. If virtualization is not accounted for, the data center’s UPS could be drawing full power, but operating at 10% capacity, reducing efficiency to 50%. If not downsized, the UPS becomes an energy sponge, in Davis’s words, sucking up cooling to remove its heat. These innovations have fed consolidations of UPS manufacturers into larger companies that can integrate all of a data center’s infrastructure components, including UPS systems to create smarter products.
As Davis tells the story, this happened because customers started asking vendors, “You’ve sold me these UPSs, they generate heat, can’t you integrate the power cooling and UPS capacity so my energy costs are reduced?” Customers also asked, “I have to put in new blade servers, but I don’t know where to put the UPS.”
Downsize to Right Size
| So right-sizing the data center’s infrastructure to fit the IT load has become the new business model for manufacturers that built their businesses selling UPS systems. Managers traditionally used the “circle the wagon” designs: put the IT equipment in the middle of the room and circle it with air conditioning. The air conditioning had to travel 60 feet to get to the heat source, but with power now being so expensive a new philosophy of containment has taken over. Don’t let hot air and cold air mix—take out the hot air at its source.
After two years of research and development, Davis says APC launched “capacity management software,” which allows it to take a patented architecture, called InfraStruXure Hot-Aisle Containment Systems, to bring precision cooling systems directly into the aisles of racks. Hot waste air is removed from one side, and cooling is delivered to the opposite side of the racks.
Davis explained the InfraStrucXure software sits on top of an aisle rack and monitors how much power and cooling is being used and what is required for the installed IT equipment. This software can also predict where new equipment will be needed and tell IT managers which rack to put it in.
For example, APC designed a portion of Sun Microsystems new energy-efficient data center in Santa Clara, CA. It provided Sun with 18 InfraStruXure Hot Aisle Containment Systems, and Sun installed three APC 800-kW uninterruptible UPS systems across two lab buildings. This Symmetra megawatt model scales from 400 kW to 1.6 MW, and offers up to 97% efficiency. Over the 10-year lifetime of the three UPS systems, energy savings could exceed $1 million, according to APC. Eaton also offers an energy efficient UPS system. Cutter & Buck, headquartered in Seattle, WA, designs and markets upscale sportswear and outerwear, which is sold primarily through golf pro shops and resorts, corporate accounts, and specialty retail accounts. It receives orders, packs, and ships thousands of units daily, and depends on a state-of-the-art distribution center and computer system that supports real-time ordering, product status, and history.
After suffering two product failures caused by power irregularities when the UPS did not provide backup power, the company realized it needed a completely different UPS architecture to improve total system availability. The company purchased two 12-kW Powerware BladeUPS modules, configured to run in parallel, and four extended-battery models, set in a single Powerware rack. The system has the flexibility of expanding from 12 kW to 60 kW, in a single 19-inch enclosure. Furthermore, each UPS module operates independently, and is completely synchronized with the other modules. In other words, there is no central main controller with backup, so, in the case of a power blackout, there is no change in control nor a single point of failure.
In the case of power failure, the company’s IBMAS400 systems can take up to 20 minutes to perform an orderly shutdown, if necessary. With Powerware BladeUPS communications capability, alarms can be sent to warn of declining power levels and to trigger an orderly shutdown if power is not restored in a timely manner.
Liebert delivered a UPS and precision cooling system to the Tuscany Casino, while still under construction in Las Vegas, NV, for its digital surveillance system. Traditionally, casinos relied on a taped security camera system, which requires swapping tapes every eight hours and maintaining a seven-day archive. The new digital surveillance system would eliminate that labor-intensive work, but it required a secure IT infrastructure. If the surveillance system goes down, the casino must cease revenue-generating gaming activities.
When Data Center Associates, a technical and environmental infrastructure design company, reviewed the original plans for the data center, they found the UPS was oversized and the data center space was undersized. Furthermore, the building air conditioners were specified for environmental control, rather than the precision units typically used in data center applications. The design was overhauled, tripling the size of the data center and mounting all equipment in racks. The UPS was downsized from 185 kVA to a Liebert 65-kVA Npower, with 45 minutes of battery capacity, double-conversion, online technology, and a maintenance bypass. The casino owners had to be convinced to substitute precision cooling for the building air conditioners, and the Liebert Deluxe Series 3 was installed to provide the precision cooling, air filtration, and humidity control. Furthermore, the IT systems had to be tested before utility power was available, and the Liebert UPS conditioned power from two temporary generators during the installation process.
The acquisition of ONEAC Corp., by Chloride Power Protection Co. allowed it to expand into the North American market. As mentioned earlier, Chloride markets UPS systems under both its and ONEAC’s names. ONEAC manufactures small, single-phase, line-interactive UPS systems, ranging in size from 250 VA to 3 kVA. In line interactive systems, the transfer switch, which opens when input power fails, is in direct line to the inverter. Power flow is then transferred to battery backup. This is most commonly the design used for small retail businesses, IT, and telecom applications.
|
Photo: APC |
| APCs InfrastruXure |
ONEAC also offers single-phase, double-conversion, online systems sized from 700 VA to 20 kVA. The double conversion online system, commonly used for larger loads, is designed such that input AC failure does not activate the transfer switch, since input power flows directly through the rectifier and inverter while charging the backup battery. All of ONEAC’s UPS systems include power conditioning to protect loads from power spikes, surges, and other interferences.
In North America, Chloride currently offers three-phase, double-conversion UPS systems sized from 10 kVA to 750 kVA in single modules, many of which can be paralleled for redundancy or additional capacity. It also offers another group of systems sized from 10 kVA to 75 kVA, that are designed for UL924 emergency lighting applications in single-module applications that cannot be paralleled.
Chloride’s North American three-phase UPSs currently have efficiencies up to 93.8%, depending on size and voltage configuration, according to Chloride product marketing manager Chuck Heller. The larger units have fairly consistent efficiencies down to below 50% load. As to costs, he said it all depends on how much backup the customer wants, the size of the unit, and whether redundancy is required. He estimated a large-scale (over 500 kVA) single-module system with 10-minute battery backup would cost around $300 per kVA. The cost of the battery is nearly half of that and increases with runtime.
Typical applications for an ONEAC system include Gooding’s Supermarket in central Florida. The area’s harsh storms, accompanied by heavy lightning, were playing havoc with the store’s systems, causing terminals to lose contact with remote printers and rendering touch screens unresponsive. Data became garbled, and communications between different parts of the network slowed down or ceased. Once the ONEAC power-conditioned UPS system was installed, it absorbed the potentially destructive transients, and the supermarket has experienced no power-related problems since then.
The Birmingham (AL) Public Library also experienced devastating and expensive hits by power surges and lightning strikes to its information network connecting 40 remote locations. The library installed ONEAC’s On Series UPS with power conditioner, and online communication line protectors. Later, following another power surge that destroyed a television set, terminal, and other equipment, the information systems equipment protected by the UPS was saved.
Can UPS and DG Be Partners?
Heller suggests that facilities with onsite generation could use a UPS in the transition period between a power failure and the startup, or restart of the generation system. His advice to companies that have some type of onsite generation is that all critical applications should be protected by UPSs. Robert Walker, with JT Packard, says the newest UPS systems are very compatible with generation equipment being used to generate additional power or as backup systems.
He explained the new digital IGBT—isolated gate bipolar transistor—which is the heart and soul of a UPS’s inverter. In combination with digital signal processors, it reduces the number of components and increases reliability. Moreover, these digital components reduce total harmonic distortion, accept all qualities of power, and make the UPS operate more compatibly with generators.
Rich Zajkowski, with Emerson Network Power, was a bit more specific. He reported that new power generation technologies, including gas and diesel generators, require special consideration when a UPS is installed. Some UPS technologies treat utility power differently than when they draw power from the generator. These differences sometimes result in the need to oversize the generator capacity in order to work properly with a UPS.
Other UPS designs incorporate technology that allows the UPS and generator capacity to be more closely matched. When matching a generator and a UPS, it is best to confer with the manufacturers of both the generator and the UPS. Zajkowski outlined some of the UPS design considerations that should be taken into account when matching a UPS with a generator:
- Is the UPS power factor corrected?
- If so, does it use a high-frequency conversion stage or a SCR-based converter?
- What is the input harmonic profile of the UPS?
- Can the UPS input power factor lead under any load or line condition? (This could be a problem with some
generators.) - What is the type of load and the range of load that can be expected to be placed on the generator, in terms of kilowatts
and kilovolt-amps? - What loads are connected to the same UPS?
- What is the additional load represented by the UPS battery charger?
- Can the UPS battery charger be automatically turned off or throttled back when the generator is supplying power?
To learn more about the companies reviewed here, and read the case studies they’ve included, one can visit these Web sites: www.apc.com; www.powerware.com; www.liebert.com, www.jtpackard.com, www.oneac.com, and www.chlorideups.com.