Friday, September 16th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	Active Power Aims at Cloud Data Centers with Longer UPS Runtime Active Power, an electrical infrastructure vendor that specializes in data center UPS systems that rely on flywheels instead of batteries for energy storage, has introduced a system with much longer runtime than an older model, addressing the biggest problem that prevented it from selling to some of the largest data center operators – internet and cloud giants as well as some of the biggest colocation providers. By spinning the flywheel faster, Active Power has increased its UPS runtime by 78 percent under certain conditions. Running at full load, the runtime has gone from 15 to 25 seconds, while at partial load (40 to 50 percent, which is the range most data center operators run their UPS systems in) the runtime has been extended to nearly one minute, Anderson Hungria, Active Power’s senior product manager UPS, said in an interview. Flywheel-based UPS systems are more environmentally friendly than battery-based ones, but short runtime has prevented them from being widely deployed in data centers. Chasing Hyperscalers One of Active Power’s largest-scale customer is Yahoo, which installed the flywheel-powered UPS in its Yahoo Computing Coop data centers. But the vendor has had a hard time convincing other hyperscale data center operators, who are uncomfortable with the short runtime. For example, one large cloud provider Active Power has spoken with needed 35 seconds, Todd Kiehn, VP marketing and modular infrastructure solutions, said. “We were unable to get there economically with the prior generation of product.” While a single data center backup generator typically starts in 10 seconds or less, large data center operators run multiple generators in parallel. These parallel systems take longer to start, requiring longer UPS runtime. Yahoo needed 18 to 20 seconds of runtime, Hungria said, and Active Power was able to get there by lowering the load on individual UPS units deployed at Yahoo data centers. Kiehn expects the new CleanSource 275XT product and the runtime headroom it provides will enable the vendor to get to more large-scale customers without having them lower the UPS load. Running electrical equipment at lower loads usually translates to low energy efficiency and low capital efficiency, because you’re paying for capacity you aren’t using. Spinning Faster The company’s engineers extended the runtime by spinning the flywheel at 10,000 revolutions per minute instead of 7,700 RPM, Hungria said. Key to this year-and-a-half-long engineering project was the work they had done on Active Power’s CleanSource HD UPS, which combined a flywheel with batteries to extend runtime. They “leveraged a lot of the CleanSource HD electronics and design and imported that into the smaller platform to create 275XT,” he said. Another capability Active Power hopes will make its new data center UPS more attractive for cloud providers is hooking up multiple units to work in parallel to increase capacity and/or redundancy. Its predecessor, CleanSource 300, was a stand-alone unit. The company has kept the cost of the unit the same as the preceding model: $80,000 per flywheel, according to Hungria. The Race to One Minute These three characteristics – runtime, capacity, and cost – are what all UPS vendors constantly work to balance against each other. Higher capacity means higher runtime but also costs more, so companies selling systems powered by led acid batteries have been working to lower their runtime to bring the cost down; but they can only lower it so much before they don’t have enough capacity to deliver the load, Hungria explained. Demand in the data center UPS market today is trending toward shorter runtimes, and Active Power and its competitors are all racing toward 1 minute runtime, which appears to be the sweet spot. “It’s’ getting to a point where 1 minute is where most end users are comfortable with,” Hungria said. Active Power is racing to this sweet spot from the bottom, while battery-based UPS vendors, whose typical runtimes are four to five minutes, are racing to it from the top. (Comment on this)
4:52p	A Coming Backlash Against Technology Companies (Bloomberg View) — The financial crisis and the bailouts that followed unleashed a wave of populist anger, targeting almost everyone with power, from Wall Street to government officials to “elites” more generally. Except in one sector: technology. Why has tech been spared the torches and pitchforks? Because everybody loves a winner. As the economy began to grow again in 2009, it had a new dominant force: The technology sector emerged from the financial crisis ready to thrive. Apple released both the iPhone 4 and the iPad in 2010, as fans made a ritual out of waiting for hours for new products on launch day. “The Social Network” was released in theaters later that year, cementing Facebook’s place in the popular imagination. In May 2011, LinkedIn became the first high-profile technology company since the financial crisis to complete its initial public offering, and the stock doubled on its first day, a throwback to the dot-com bubble of the ’90s. And in August of that year, Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and co-founder of Netscape, published an essay whose title became a catchphrase: “Why Software Is Eating the World.” Tech had become the golden child of the post-crisis era, with San Francisco its new capital. Then came glory days for the tech sector. After an IPO stumble, Facebook cracked the code of mobile advertising and became a $350 billion company. Amazon rode the success of its Amazon Web Services cloud platform to a similar valuation. Apple and Alphabet, parent company of Google, jockeyed to become the most valuable company in the world. The rest of corporate America tried to adopt the language of tech, with words like “disruption” entering the popular lexicon. Chambers of commerce pitched their cities as the next Silicon Valley. General Electric advertised itself as a digital company rather than an industrial one. This growth has changed tech’s role in society. In 2010, the new tech boom may have been best defined by trivial consumer companies with smartphone apps like Groupon and Zynga, which offered coupons to yoga classes and a few minutes of gaming distraction. Today’s tech titans are anything but trivial. Facebook, once a way to keep up with your friends, has evolved to be a dominant media platform for news and public opinion. Amazon has gone from dominating e-commerce to increasingly appearing like it will dominate commerce. Uber started out as a way for tech workers in San Francisco to hail black cars, but now aims to increase its market share for all ground transportation around the world. When companies become this important in society, their stumbles are judged harshly. In recent months Facebook has gotten in hot water with conservatives who saw a partisan bias in its human-curated “trending” news product, and with liberals for censoring the Pulitzer-winning “Napalm Girl” photograph from the Vietnam War. Some of Amazon and Google’s services, like Prime Now and Google Fiber, have been implemented in dense and wealthy urban areas at the exclusion of less-wealthy and rural communities, raising questions of social equity and discrimination. Should Uber’s market share grow to the extent that it becomes an essential service for communities, its ability to leave cities that resist it, as it did this year in Austin, would further the view of some that the company behaves like a bully. An equally disturbing trend in this generation of tech companies is the extent to which founders and executives have structured their firms to limit the power of shareholders and other outsiders. Facebook and Google both have created multiple classes of shares to ensure that key shareholders retain majority control of their companies. And, to be fair, investors who don’t like this arrangement can choose simply not to own the stock. But should, say, Facebook make a unilateral unpopular move to censor a sensitive topic from its news feed to serve either its financial or ideological interests, a populist mob might scream, “Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have the right to decide what a billion people can or cannot see.” And they would be right. And what would happen then? Consider past examples. When Wall Street and the housing sector became the targets of populist anger, they faced fines and increased regulations. When government becomes a target, there is less political will for funding and broad powers. For the technology sector, we’d likely see a combination of three things – fines for misbehavior, increased regulation, and perhaps even federal action to break up perceived monopolists. Some have called the early 21st century a new Gilded Age. If it is, the next question is who will be to this era what Teddy Roosevelt was to the prior one: the people’s champion who broke the power of ruthless monopolists. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners, as well as the opinion of Data Center Knowledge and Penton. (Comment on this)
5:59p	ASHRAE’s New Data Center Efficiency Standard is Out: Here’s What You Need to Know ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers) has published the final version of its data center efficiency standard, recognizing that data centers’ unique characteristics mean that it’s difficult to measure them by the same set of standards as other building types, as they have been until now. The standard, ASHRAE 90.4, was designed to ensure that only the most inefficient data centers are non-compliant, the organization said in a statement. Its authors used an “80/20 rule” to set efficiency requirements, meaning only facilities below the 20th percentile wouldn’t meet them. As expected, the standard does not use PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, to measure data center efficiency. One of its earlier drafts proposed using Design PUE, an ASHRAE concept created to measure efficiency of a facility’s electrical and mechanical systems’ design. It’s different from PUE, the widely used data center efficiency metric created by The Green Grid, and meant to measure operational efficiency, not design efficiency. Read more: Green Grid Seeking Clarity Following ASHRAE PUE Agitation In later drafts, the committee working on the standard changed course, striking PUE and replacing it with two more granular metrics, similar to PUE in concept but each focusing on its own individual part of the infrastructure: Mechanical Load Component, or MLC, and Electrical Loss Component, or ELC. Those are the metrics that made it into the official standard published this week. There is also an alternative compliance path, which allows for tradeoffs between the two. If your cooling infrastructure is so efficient that it compensates for a less efficient electrical system, for example, you may choose this alternative path to compliance. ASHRAE standards aren’t law, and the organization doesn’t enforce compliance. However, local building officials rely on them extensively in inspections and permitting, so even though they are merely recommendations, they can have costly and disruptive repercussions for expensive and complicated data center construction or upgrade projects. Now that ASHRAE 90.4 is out, the organization will work to remove data centers from Standard 90.1, an older efficiency standard that covers nearly all types of buildings. That 90.4 has been published doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. The standard is under a “continuous maintenance process,” meaning it can be changed through ASHRAE’s addenda mechanism. The cost of Standard 90.4-2016, Energy Standard for Data Centers, is $89 for ASHRAE members and $105 for non-members. To order, visit www.ashrae.org/bookstore or contact ASHRAE Customer Contact Center at 1-800-527-4723 (United States and Canada) or 404-636-8400 (worldwide) or fax 678-539-2129. (Comment on this)

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