We provide increased efficiency that does not sacrifice uptime and keeps the data center up & running.

Syed Sajjadh Ali

Managing Director - Eaton - Electrical Sector India

Data centers today are one of the largest consumers of electricity. How critical is it to ensure uninterrupted power supply as well as efficient power management systems inside the data center for smooth operations?

Data centres are huge power guzzlers and require uninterrupted power supply for maintaining stability of operations even at times of power fluctuations and outages in order to eliminate unavailability or loss of data. According to various reports, globally, data centres account for about 3% of energy use, equivalent to about 200 million tons of carbon emissions, which is expected to grow by over 30% every year.

At Eaton, we're on a mission to help companies optimize their data centers and business for tomorrow, We offer innovative, mission-critical solutions that deliver higher availability, improve efficiency, and offer flexible, scalable solutions that meet the specific needs of a business.

Eaton provides reliable power distribution equipment, DC network power systems, and uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) to ensure a steady flow of high-quality power—because an outage of just a few milli-seconds can mean catastrophe in a data center.

When setting up a data center, Eaton will also help a company set a disaster recovery program in place to deal with any unexpected emergencies, safeguarding the company's data and network so your business can continue operations without missing a beat.

Eaton's three-phase, high-efficiency UPS products provide maximum savings through unrivalled power performance in efficiency, input current harmonic distortion (THD), and power factor. The innovative, transformer less design reduces consumed raw materials and lowers freight costs with a substantially smaller footprint.

How does Eaton support the data center infrastructure? Tell us about your range of solutions and how is it benefiting customers in reducing cost and provide the convenience of agility, flexibility, space optimization, etc?

Our solutions help achieve a performance-optimized data center with unmatched reliability. We provide increased efficiency that does not sacrifice uptime and keeps the data center up and running. With our modular solution offerings, we provide flexibility in data center design. We work with our customers to ensure that the data center white space is being used as efficiently as possible, and that the data center is scalable up or down based on the needs.

Design for agility and flexibility

We leverage emerging technologies to trigger building a supporting infrastructure that could outlive the IT equipment and management software itself. This helps to build a scalable model, which evolves with the change in the technology.  For example, in 2009-12 when virtualisation gained prominence in the Datacentres, Eaton was first to market with integrated power management solution for virtual environments. Later during the era of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure we led the market in terms of maximum number of technical alliances and reference architectures with server/storage OEM's. Today with hybrid cloud models we are driving newer efficiencies and scalability with our integration with hybrid cloud providers.

Space optimisation

Optimising space in any data center is a major concern, as it at premium in any data center.  The intelligent product design is the ideal solution for the space conscious set-up. Our innovative product designs help to free-up space by routing power and cabling above or below, eliminating components, and shrinking actual footprints.

Eaton's offers one of the most compact and reliable switchgear in the market today. We also offer SF6 free Ring Main Units which eliminates the use of the ozone depleting SF6 gas altogether. The design of our PDUs has a low profile with no bulky switches. Our portfolio enables denser cabling inside of the racks and the flexibility to move and remove equipment, deliver better airflow, and take advantage of high-performance computing.

Upgrade the data center infrastructure

We realise that establishing a new infrastructure for a data center doesn't conclude our responsibilities. Incorporating the aging infrastructure with the nascent technology is a big part of the solutions. The aging infrastructure is always susceptible to threats, is difficult to maintain and hampers the productivity. We assess the equipment performance including the efficiency, scalability or footprint advantages of newer technologies, present maintenance, repair and service contracts costs and other factors that impact the company's ROI. We are proficient in upgrading a company's infrastructure to a faster, more efficient one, and more cost-effective process. We provide products and services that are compatible with existing installations so that an enterprise gets all the benefits of the new equipment without a large investment in preparation.

What are the future technologies that the company is excited about? What are your plans for the next 2-3 years for expansion in newer segments, adding more capacity, investments, etc?

“Edge computing” has emerged as the latest IT deployment model driven by the growing number of 'Work from Home' users, and adoption of IoT use cases. Edge computing reduces latency and increases fault tolerance, however IT managers often under-estimate the difficulty in maintaining uptime of a large number of Edge sites. Eaton Brightlayer Data center suite enables the IT department to smoothly transition from being an expert in managing few large enterprise datacentres to also being an expert in managing large number of smaller Edge sites.

With Eaton's Brightlayer Data Centers suite, data center managers fix issues as they happen—or prevent them entirely. Eaton's software applications include everything from data center infrastructure management (DCIM) with capacity analytics and 3D visualizations to advanced, automatic remediations and cloud-based analytics that help predict power component failure.

Considering the recurrences of natural calamities (such as flooding during monsoon or cyclone) especially in remote areas where such data centers are located, what are the measures taken to ensure that the data center infrastructure remains unaffected?

It's worth mentioning just how disruptive the Covid-19 outbreak has been for data centers. Most businesses assume that natural disasters are specific, localized events that will have at worst, impacts on the regional level. What the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated, however, is that some risks have the potential to be truly global. Data centers around the world have been forced to adjust their operational procedures on the fly to maintain consistent operational uptime while also meeting the demands of social distancing requirements. Remote monitoring technologies like DCIM and automated systems have helped businesses to deal with the crisis better.

Safety is important, for not only data and equipment, but also workers. Eaton engineers provide diagnostic arc flash studies, retrofit programs, and employee training to assess guidelines, reduce fault current and duration, place people away from faults and prevent faults through predictive diagnostic tools and monitoring equipment. Eaton data center solutions include Eaton UPS products, enclosures, power distribution, advanced power management, and reliability techniques, and world-class services. We can help build a power system that delivers the reliable, high-quality power a data center needs. We help enterprises find competitive advantages by seeing every power system as a strategic asset to be measured and managed in an integrated way throughout its life cycle. Taking a broader view of a power system as wholly integrated leads to powerful results: greater reliability, operating cost efficiencies, effective use of capital, enhanced safety, and risk mitigation.

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