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Cost, speed and reliability trade-offs between N+1 UPS Configurations


Johannesburg, 10 Jul 2017
Cost, Speed, and Reliability Tradeoffs between N+1 UPS Configurations.
Cost, Speed, and Reliability Tradeoffs between N+1 UPS Configurations.

Data centres implement varying degrees of redundancy, based on the criticality of the load(s) they support. Dual path architectures (two separate power paths, for example) provide the highest levels of availability, as maintenance or failure can occur with any system without taking down the load.

In today's data centres, however, we are seeing more and more fault tolerance occur through software, at the IT layer. With technologies such as virtualisation and hyper-convergence, no longer is it true that a server going down means the IT mission goes down. If a physical server goes down due to an upstream failure, or is scheduled to go down for maintenance, the data centre is able to migrate the business function(s) over to another server, another pod, another room, or a completely separate data centre.

While availability is still the critical objective of data centres, some are finding that this can now be achieved with N+1 redundancy of key physical infrastructure systems like the UPS. In this paper, we will clarify the different methods of achieving N+1 redundancy of your UPS system(s), quantify the capital cost, deployment time, efficiency, and reliability trade-offs, and discuss the importance of fault tolerance within the UPS to ensure reliability, availability, and maintainability needs are met.

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