This video outlines Dr Ian Bitterlin’s view, a Chartered Engineer within the Data Centre industry for over 25 years, regarding data centre design topologies.
Video Transcript
Dr Ian F Bitterlin: My name’s Ian Bitterlin and I’m a chartered engineer. I’ve been in the data centre industry for the best part of 25 years.
Obviously once you’ve got your basic building block of a single module UPS that’s parallel-able and reliable and redundant; you can build within topologies that meet those said requirements.
Obviously in classic terms, we talk about the tier of the classifications, from one to four.
In 1, you would have no redundancy so you’re reliant on the single UPS module.
In tier 2, you’re looking at a redundant situation then plus one redundancy so you can be an unlimited amount of maintenance on your UPS system without changing the UPS availability – or you can survive a failure of one UPS module.
When you get to tier 3, you have an active and a passive path, so that’s two paths to get power to the load.
And tier 4, two completely active paths with two UPS systems and the availability more or less goes up by a factor of ten as you advance through those tiers – so once you’ve got your basic building block, whether that be module or standalone, we can then build it into a system topology that meets the client’s appetite for risk and budget.
And obviously the less risk they want to take, the more it’s going to cost in terms of the UPS system.
