Power: The Lifeblood of Your Rack Design – Part 1
We all know 19” racks require power and that at some point when integrating a rack we will need to work out how to power not only the rack enclosure but every item in it.
What most of us never consider is how important this element of the rack can be, or how easily it can be overlooked, only to cause issues in the future. Electrical energy (power) is the food and the lifeblood of your rack.
As with any machine your rack has a function and a specific task to perform, however mechanically a rack is more akin to you than it is in fact by definition a machine. Just as your own body is controlled by electrical impulses and data, well so is your rack, just as your health is a result of the impacts of your environment and the food you consume, a rack reliability is a result of its environment and the energy it is supplied, just as your body converts the energy it is supplied to perform a task and generate and or regulate heat, well it’s no surprise you rack does this too!
In a two part blog, I’ll be taking a closer look at the important role power can play in 19” rack design and integration.
Step One: Understanding What is Required
The prequel to managing the supply is understanding the requirement, we need to consider the provision of a healthy rack and acknowledge the function it is to perform, as with any living thing there must be a reasonable expectancy of life, yes it is bionic and yes we can rebuild it, but no it probably won’t live forever (well at least not without a lot of help).
Once we understand how long a rack must operate and the function it will perform, we can review the environment that will exist within it (draft a power budget as soon as you have an understanding of your requirement), this understanding will define not only the rack you use but any mitigation strategies you need to apply to ensure a long and healthy life of the rack and its contents (given the performance criteria and environment).
This holistic view of the rack, its function, the devices that will exist within it, and the environment it operates within will allow you to later define the finer detail of your goal, which should be to create a rack capable of operating to if not extending the MTBF of the components within it and ensuring reliable and consistent operation.
So where do we start?
Let’s start at the beginning, given that we know the environment we should know the details of the supply and any upstream protection offered to the rack such as fuses, switches, isolation, filtration, number of phases, voltage frequency etc. What we probably don’t know is the quality of the supply.
Step Two: The Vital Organs: Managing the Supply
Given that the requirement is for a rack and we now have an understanding of the basics of the electrical supply to the rack, we need to define what else is needed in order to manage an output compatible for a long life.
Just as with you or I, it is the heart and other vital organs which determine the filtering, conditioning and flow of the blood. So it’s crucial to establish if your rack requires further conditioning filtering and control.
If you don’t know or can’t establish the quality of the supply it is worth considering the long term costs of getting this wrong, will you be supplying UPS products to rack for example which never need them, or experiencing consistent and seemingly unpredictable failures due to a fluctuating or poor quality supply. Ensuring you provide the hardware in the rack with good clean power is a key element to ensuring operational reliability.
That’s all for now, but watch this space for part 2 next week where we’ll take a look at distribution and how to ensure long and healthy operation of your rack.
If you can’t wait, or maybe would like to get more detail on this and many other rack integration topics, why not take a look at our series of Rack Integration Masterclass Forums ?
https://www.captec-group.com/events/rack-integration-masterclass-forum-june-2015/