What are the requirements and needs to be checked before buying a UPS for a data center? Does size matter? I am really now aware of the power rating of a UPS. Can anyone explain it to me? I know energy efficiency is a very important criteria.
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You should probably consult with a few UPS brands and their sales people and factories before you dive into this!
What are you backing up? Servers? You should check the power consumption of all of your servers and add it up. This will give you a ballpark idea of how much UPS power you need......
We have about 3,000 square feet of new, planned data center. Right now, we are figuring on about 30 enclosures. Some will be blade, some will be just network and I/O equipment. There will be some storage, SAN, and tape drive.
I believe the latest estimates are 300 kilowatts of power but that won't be from day one.
Well that's your answer right there: 300kW. UPSs are sized and sold off of kVA, not kW. So 300kW=375kVA at a standard power factor of 0.8
What about redundancy and scalability of the UPS? It sounds like they have a small-ish data center so a 375kVA UPS might not be in their budget right now.... just saying.
You can get a 150 kVA now, and if you need more, get another UPS later on...?
Some types of UPSs are scalable which means you can upgrade or increase their capacity over time.
The way a scabale UPS works is you buy a system cabinet up front, with one or more power modules. As your load increases, you can buy more power modules. The power modules connect on a common bus.
So the system cabinet is sized for XXX kVA at full build-out. You start with XX kVA and can add XXX-XX kVA along the way.
That is nice how you can expand a UPS to be bigger, but I wonder if it is expensive to upgrade a UPS or if it would be better to buy a new, larger UPS system?
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