— 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.