Data centres power monitoring and analysis

Data Centres are moving into the spot light again as one of the significant and growing power consumers (2.1 percent of national consumption in 2013, according to EECA’s E3 latest report). Smart and efficient ways in using electrical power are becoming necessary and more attractive to all business sizes in the industry. These include power quantity, costing and quality analysis, but it all begins with smart Measuring Instruments and dedicated software and management tools.

Direct Control is a wellknown contracting company in the fields of HVAC control, BMS, power quality management and solutions among all the other services they’ve been providing for over 20 years.

Their distinguished suppliers in Europe and the USA have been busy with innovative and efficient products to improve power monitoring and cost calculations solutions for all kinds of applications including data centres.

The dedicated integration technical team at direct control offer some great cost effective solutions to help this growing market with these latest quality products.

For example, simple yet powerful solutions are available from Janitza Electronics GmbH for recording power information on both rack and server levels and push this data to a cloud based energy portal.

Solutions are available for data to be read either directly via clip-on current transformers (retro fit) or from individual power meters. This is a growing business for Janitza and the technology is well adopted and priced to meet the innovations in the industry. Janitza system was used for power measurement and monitoring in the Revera data centre.

They have lately used PacketPower products to connect Gen-i’s data centres in Hamilton, Christchurch and Dunedin.

The system enables Gen-i to monitor and analyse energy consumption in each rack with a network of wireless power connectors and invoice their customers accordingly. They use the cloud based energy application EMX energy portal to analyse energy usage, access real time data, create dashboards, and get alerts and notifications. It is a powerful expandable system which grows with Gen- i needs and data centres.

Direct Control understands that every customer is different and their usage and consumption patterns would vary almost every hour in the day, so whether it is a new project or a retro fit they can assist in sorting out your rack power monitoring, datalogging, and costing so each customer is fairly charged for his own real power usage.

Data centre Infrastructure management DCiM, power metering, and building management systems BMS are some of the complete solutions they offer to provide control and visibility across the entire data centre infrastructure.