Running a data center can be tough business. If
the investment in equipment doesn’t put a massive dent in your budget, year-to-year
operations costs certainly might as your equipment draws immense amounts of
power from your suppliers.
Data centers
are increasingly being put under pressure to run leaner and meaner. While that
generally means investing in power-saving equipment technologies such as SSD
and taking full advantage of techniques such as hard drive spin down, it also
entails gathering data on a center’s power draw over time.
The problem
with measuring the energy usage of a data center, however, is that the power running
through the electrical mains is so great that it would damage sensitive
monitoring equipment. Measuring power after step down on a per cabinet basis is
also not an option as it is unnecessarily expensive, and it won’t mirror the
actual load on the supply.
The most
common solution around this is the installation of current transformers to convert
the high-voltage, high-amperage mains input into a smaller, proportional current.
The current can then be measured either by connecting an ammeter to the transformer
or by connecting the transformer to a power meter that, with the proper
software, can be used to collate the facility’s power consumption.
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