CeBIT 007 Cuts down the frazzled-body count
THERE WERE A LOT of goodies at the APC stand this year, if you define goodies as big racks full of power equipment. The firm was also extending the command and control facilities, monitoring, and in general making things easier for the data centre trolls.
The first box we came to was the PX500 and it's smaller sibling the PX250. These are a big 250 and 500KW UPSs, although that term is a little simplistic for what they do. Everything is redundant, hot swappable, and generally dsigned to minimise or eliminate downtime.
The PX500 pictured above is a rack of controllers on the right, a rack of modules on the left. If you swap the 500KW unit on the bottom for a 250, you end up with a PX250. Conversely, if you start out with a 250 and outgrow it, you just upgrade that part. The rest stays in place.
On the left you have a rack for 25KW battery modules, all hot-plug. You can fit ten per rack, so a 250 needs one rack, a 500 two. The unit is modular, so you can add units as your capacity or budget grows, all hot plug, no down time.
More interestingly, you can add redundancy on a sub-unit level or at the rack level. You can specify all ten units on line for 250KW per rack, or go in an N+1 config for nine units providing 225KW and one redundant. You can also do N+2, N+x or just have all ten on line. On top of this, you can chain up to four PX500s together and have redundancy there as well. Three racks for 1500KW plus one hot spare.
If you max things out, you can have 2000KW, more than enough for the average home and the surrounding neighbourhood, or about half of what you need for a the stereo in a rap star's Escalade. They will be available in late 2007 in the US, 2008 in EMEA.
That brings us to the smaller cousin of the bunch, the PX160. It may have similar nomenclature, but it is a very different animal, having no parts in common with the PX250/500. It is a 160KW UPS with ten hot-swap 16KW modules. You can do the same type of internal redundancies as the bigger boxes.
This smaller sibling brings some interesting features to the table, mostly an internal and external bypass. This allows you to hot swap any components in the system by basically going around the whole unit. This happens transparently, and as long as there is no power failure while the system is being worked on, you are just fine.
The other really cool bit is the modular breakers. Normally, when you want to add more breakers and feeds to a unit like this, you need a qualified electrician. There is a lot of voltage running through these things, and one misplaced screwdriver can make an IT person into an extra-crispy IT person. Even if you send an expendable junior intern in to do it, smoking charred bodies tend to be indicative of other downtime-related problems.
The APC solution to this is modular breakers that are moron-installable. You get a breaker with the wires installed, and you just plug it in. It snaps into place and powers up as a unit. It even has a data connector so the monitoring is added with each breaker. Those are the grey blocks in the above pictures, you pull the cables in from the top, and plug the breaker unit in. It takes all of a minute, two if you are really slow.
That brings up the next little bit. You have your power taken care of, if anything hiccoughs, alarms go of, people are paged at 3am, and the usual panic happens. What about the rest of the data centre? That is where the Netbotz line from APC comes in.
Last time I talked to APC about a year ago, these Netbotz were about to be released, and now they have been. This is a glorified sensor package that ties into the whole APC infrastructure. They have a camera, motion detectors, temp, humidity, and airflow sensors. You can also plug in USB or dry contact sensors, and there is a video in for old-school cameras. APC really doesn't care what you add to it, the more the merrier.
You can record anything you would like to, it is mainly limited by the amount of disk space and bandwidth you want to dedicate to it. There is also a snapshot feature that will allow you to capture five minutes before and after any trigger.
This is all controlled by a bit of software called Infrastruxure Central. APC just launched a new version, V4.0 that is nicer, better and more nearly everything that it's predecessor. It has views made for IT guys and others for facilities people. One control panel can watch over multiple sites, it is all in how you set up the feeds.
Central is extensible and open, if you want to write a plug in for it, APC won't stop you, in fact it will probably do just the opposite. When you couple the sensors in all of the APC Infrastruxure line with the additional monitoring of Netbotz and a command and control panel, you have a really powerful system. That is what APC is going for, not just a big battery, but an overall data centre in a box or two. The firm is aiming to deliver the physical infrastructure for power, cooling and monitoring, and make it seamless. From what we have seen in the lineup, the firm has very few gaps.
The INQuirer
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