— B. Venkata Rao, Country Manager—
Large & Medium UPS Systems, Emerson Network Power (India)
Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson, protects and
optimizes critical infrastructure for data centres, communications
networks, healthcare and industrial facilities. The company provides
new-to-the-world solutions, as well as established expertise and
smart innovation in areas including AC and DC power and
renewable energy, precision cooling systems, infrastructure
management, embedded computing and power, integrated racks
and enclosures, power switching and controls, and connectivity.
B. Venkata Rao discusses how Emerson is geared to offer the most
energy-efficient power management solutions.
We observe that power backup solutions have evolved from
simple UPS systems to very complex power management
solutions. Please take us through this transition.
Virtualization, cloud computing and growing infrastructure
requirements to take care of thermal overruns have
necessitated a planned effective management of physical and IT
infrastructure, including power management infrastructure. In
most data centres, the operating expenditure outstrips the
capital investment within the first few months of operation.
Consequently, optimizing operational and energy expenditure in
the face of multiplying heat density and expensive power without
compromising on availability is the challenge.
It is essential for businesses to build a dynamic critical
infrastructure that supports IT agility and enables operational
efficiencies that contribute to business innovation and give them
a competitive advantage. Complex or extreme density power
management solutions can deliver better efficiency levels at
extreme compute densities and can be upgraded without
incurring significant costs. As a result, they help achieve
considerable cost savings.
What are the special demands on power backup or management
solutions from the rapidly-growing data centre businesses?
An evolved data centre ecosystem and adoption of cloud and
virtualized environments have hugely increased the average
heat density in facilities, thereby acting as stimuli to boost
demand for planned power management. UPS systems
harnessing renewable sources of energy such as solar or wind are finding applications in key sectors, and
I expect renewable energy to soon be the
order of the day. It also implies that power
management will be brought under
centralized control and will help reduce
power consumption.
Power management solutions, as we
understand, now involve much of software
applications to bring about more
efficiency. Can you please explain?
DCIM software is being adopted widely in
business-critical applications that demand
frequent customization, multiple-server
handling or remote management and
hence closer management of the power
infrastructure as well. DCIM software
improves energy and operational
efficiency by offering insights into exactly
when and how rack capacity will be
impacted by changes over time. This ability equips facility
managers to deal with dynamic load variations in the data centre
or rapidly changing customer demands.
Emerson Network Power’s Trellis platform is a game changing
DCIM platform that gives access to IT and physical
infrastructure on a single seamless dashboard, thereby enabling
facility managers to manage power in tandem with other
variables.
Tell us about recent solutions from Emerson for highly demanding
sectors like data centres.
We have just brought in Smart Solutions, a family of intelligent,
integrated infrastructure systems for the data centre. These
Smart Solutions bring together best-of-breed technologies and
industry best practices to enable cost-effective management of
capacity, efficiency and availability through interoperable
systems configured to speed implementation, adapt to change
and reduce costs.
Smart Solutions are designed according to industry best
practices for the data centre to address challenges associated
with balancing objectives for capacity, space utilization,
availability and efficiency. Our Smart Solutions portfolio delivers
‘Efficiency without Compromise’ through a cost-effective power,
precision cooling and management infrastructure that helps
organizations achieve their IT objectives regardless of size and
complexity.
There have been recent additions to our product lines, which
span across the entire gamut of passive infrastructure for
modern data centres. In the AC power segment we offer the
highly energy efficient Liebert NXr and Liebert 80-Net UPS
systems. The UPS systems with high efficiency IGBT and Smarter
Controls give maximum throughput for the customer.
Amidst launching of new and efficient solutions, how does
Emerson consciously try to make its products “greener”?
At Emerson Network Power, our efforts towards researching
and enabling business-critical continuity are fine-tuned to
achieve maximum efficiency and lowest cost of ownership of UPS
solutions and Invertors. We believe that
there is a huge market for such products
that can be adapted to changing business
requirements by incurring the minimum
cost possible.
Customization and integration of
solutions is Emerson Network Power’s key
technology differentiator. We manufacture
solutions based on the Adaptive
Architecture™ model for dynamic
environments. The core objective of
Adaptive Architecture™ is to provide
solutions which are 1) reliable, 2) scalable
or flexible, and most importantly 3) TCOoptimized
i.e. are built to reduce
operational expenses. All our products are
designed in adherence with the philosophy
of Adaptive Architecture.
We are also focusing on solar UPS and
inverters that come in handy in rural areas.
These solutions have already made a strong headway in the
Indian telecom sector and are now more commonly deployed in
far-flung telecom towers.
Our products are designed with not just our customers in
mind, but also the customers’ customers. A cursory glance at
Emerson Network Power’s solutions reveals that each product is
designed with ‘Efficiency without Compromise’ as its
cornerstone. Be it the Digital Scroll Compressor with EC Fan
technology or IGBT based transformer-less high efficiency UPS,
highest efficiency rectifiers in telecom power, to designing racks
with aluminum extrusion with 83 per cent perforation to optimize
heat dissipation – all our products pass the litmus test of being
energy efficient. We also offer solar products (both grid-tie and
off-grid) in a wide spectrum of KVA ratings.
Please explain how clean energy sources like wind and solar can,
or are being, integrated into conventional power
backup/management solutions.
Solutions based on renewable sources of energy such as solar,
wind, fuel-cells, and biogas are being researched and even
commercially deployed at some sites to optimize power
expenditure. These solutions are feasible and available at a
subsidized rate by the government. Of these, solar solutions
such as solar UPS or inverters are most widely used. During the
last few years, industries have witnessed an increasing
awareness of clean power, power system harmonics and
associated problems in low-voltage systems, both in power
utilities and consumer segment. Harmonics being one of the
major contributors of poor power quality, a better understanding
is essential to minimize its effects.
Corporations are also exploring hybrid UPS deployments in
combination with gensets, solar power solutions, or remote
management tools. Hybrid deployments have been traditionally
purchased as static hardware with a general maintenance or
warranty contract only. For businesses focused on minimizing
medium to long-term operational and capital costs and
maximizing ROI, smart hybrids with active management can aid
by achieving additional savings.