UPS Availability Requirements

This video outlines Dr Ian Bitterlin’s view, a Chartered Engineer within the Data Centre industry for over 25 years, regarding UPS availability requirements.

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.

I often get asked what availability a UPS should provide a data centre.

The problem with availability percentage, is that it depends on the meantime to repair the meantime in failure is one thing. The meantime to repair, if it’s very short, can give you a very high availability

And I think it’s much more important to think of meantime between failure as being something in excess of eight, nine, ten years before you expect any failure at all.

It’s quite important to the operator to have a very reliable system that doesn’t break down very often and I think that, at least eight years, given a data centre operation, is the sort of empty BF you should aim for than a meantime to failure obviously depends on your service backup.

A very good service backup should have an engineer well inside four hours, who can fix it with the right parts on site and spare parts and get the power system back online within six hours.

If you do that, you are looking at availabilities in the orders of five and six nines, 99.999%.

But it’s much more important to think of the time between failures, rather than the availability.

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