By Louis McGarry, Sales and Marketing Director, Centiel UK
Ensuring a supply of continuous electrical power is vital in critical environments such as hospitals, data centres and commercial institutions where even the shortest interruption may cause significant financial losses or even endanger lives. An Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system is used to provide power when the main source is interrupted or even fails, it also ensures a high level of power quality. Therefore, achieving the highest possible level of availability of a UPS system is of paramount importance.
Over the years, technological advances in architecture have increased the levels of availability that UPS solutions offer. The 4th Generation of modular UPS CumulusPower designed and manufactured by CENTIEL now provides industry-leading availability of 9 nines (99.999999999%). On a practical level, this means downtime is reduced significantly from seconds to milliseconds. To put this number into perspective, the 3rd generation of modular UPS and most commonly used architectures offer only 6 nines availability which represents seconds downtime per year compared with milliseconds.
CENTIEL’s true modular UPS CumulusPower also offers increased levels of flexibility enabling organisations to adopt a pay as you go approach and ensuring continuous right-sizing to minimise energy usage and running costs, reducing overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Uniquely, CumulusPower also offers safe-hot-swap capability. This means a module being added to a system can be fully isolated and tested within a running frame before it accepts any load. It also mitigates the risk of human error to ensure the module exchange is completed safely. CumulusPower’s Distributed Active Redundant Architecture (DARA) makes the safe-hot-swap possible. Without it, any issue with a module going into a live system could have catastrophic consequences and the load could be lost.
CumulusPower also reduces TCO through high double conversion efficiency of >97.1%. As a result, CumulusPower provides the highest level of availability possible and is currently the safest, most reliable and flexible UPS available for critical power protection.
Originally featured in Inside Networks Magazine July 2022.