Sure’s Tier III data centres on the Channel Islands keep some of Europe’s largest organisations’ critical data safe and secure in a location outside of mainland UK and Europe. Sure also offers a range of services that goes beyond traditional telecoms to connect our Island Homes. As an organisation, Sure requires the highest level of uptime and is also committed to reducing energy usage throughout its facilities.
Legacy monolithic uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) offered Sure only 80% efficiency. Sure saw this as no longer acceptable from an energy waste point of view, especially now that Sure is on a zero-carbon path.
Leading UPS manufacturer Centiel has worked with Sure since 2018. However, the past year saw the completion of work to replace monolithic UPS systems with Centiel’s leading three phase modular UPS CumulusPowerTM in Datacentres 4,5 & 8 at Sure’s Gurnsey facility.
Centiel’s three phase, true modular UPS CumulusPowerTM provides “9 nines” (99.9999999%) availability to effectively eliminate system downtime; class leading 97.1% on-line efficiency to minimise running costs; true “hot swap” modules to eliminate human error in operation.
CumulusPower now takes Sure’s energy efficiency to another level, saving significant cost and reducing carbon footprint. Due to the true modular nature of CumulusPower it is highly efficient, meaning it runs at 97% efficiency compared with <80% for the previous UPS.
Centiel now helps to provide the highest level of resilience and availability (up time) with a total of 1.58MW power backup across Sure’s Channel Island facilities.
Simon Roger, Facilities Manager, Sure explains: “The alternative to this project was to replace like for like which would not pay back at all and would maintain the current costs and losses due to inefficiencies. We could have done doing nothing, which would increase the risk of system failure until eventual end-of-life which could result in a total loss of power to the customers and Sure infrastructure loads which was unacceptable. Instead, we chose Centiel’s CumulusPower as the leading power protection technology on the market which would help us take a significant step to reducing energy consumption on our path to Net Zero.”
Simon Roger
A total cost of ownership study determined that the commercial benefits of the latest technology outweighed the maintenance and operating costs of the existing legacy equipment which justified their replacement. The predicted instant power savings of £30K per annum in DC 5 and £70K in DC 4 at today’s rates have been observed.
With the current IT load, the savings made have been estimated at 20-30% approximately.
For Datacentre 5 the CO2 Reduction over 5 Years has been calculated at 751.3 Tonnes, for DC 4 UPS A at 436.1 tonnes and 630 tonnes for UPS B. Thie equates to 2,798 (1157 + 671 + 970) trees in total for DC 4 & 5.
Further savings were seen as air conditioning was balanced in the two datacentres following installation.
As a bonus, there was a return on scrap of around £4K which benefited the business. This project was also delivered within budget and ahead of schedule to maximise the savings.
Simon Roger, Facilities Manager Sure Data Centre, confirms: “CumulusPower is highly efficient, meaning it runs at 97% efficiency compared with 80% for our previous UPS. I am pleased to say that the UPS replacements in DC’s 4 and 5 are now complete with no more switching events required and the change requests are both closed. We have seen the predicted instant power savings to support the ~£30K per annum in DC 5 and ~£70K in DC 4 at today’s rates, equating to savings of an estimated 20-30% approximately with the current IT load. The UPS are also uber reliable and take up less space and we have saved around seven racks on this installation which can be used for clients.
“CumulusPower is also unique in the market because it enables UPS modules to be swapped safely by our trained team without switching the UPS off. This hot-swap functionality means even if we need to replace a module and send it for repair, we do not experience any downtime, ensuring maximum availability for our clients.”
Simon Roger adds: “In addition to seeing a significant saving on energy costs in the Data Centres since the installation of CumulusPowerTM we have also noticed a drastic reduction in operation noise levels of the new UPS. We are currently working with the Centiel team on further projects anticipated for completion before the end of this year.”
For further information please see: www.centiel.co.uk or www.sure.com
