High-Capacity 3-Phase Rack ATS

Hi I’m Dave Slotten, VP of Product Marketing at Tripp Lite, today I want to introduce Tripp Lite’s patent-pending 3-Phase Rack ATS for 208V environments.

This system is comprised of two elements, a 1U rackmount ATS and a vertical power distribution unit that distributes power throughout your rack. Dual inputs are shown here on the left, power output on the right of this lower illustration, output circuit breakers, it’s a very simple solution that operates at very high reliability.

A traditional solution for high-density racks requires two 3-phase PDUs to distribute power to dual power supply equipment. Tripp Lite’s solution requires still two feeds obviously for redundancy, but instead those feeds go into a rack ATS and deliver power to a single vertical PDU. At 30, 50 or 60 amp capacity, that’s 8, 12 or 17kW or redundant power distributed throughout the rack, and opens up a new possibility for server design as well.

In high-density applications, customary to the cloud, high volumes of web servers, Hadoop nodes and what not, have by their nature a resilience, a reliability in their aggregation. So a single hardware element, or even a single rack failure, is not mission-critical to the overall mission. We understand this, and the cloud providers understand it, that pushing a 3-phase rack ATS, such as this, to the rack level does introduce a single point of failure. But the nature of these loads and their inbuilt, innate resiliency allows that to be an acceptable compromise because of the benefits that are afforded by this different approach.

Those benefits from single power supplies are substantial. Eliminating the cost of a second power supply, its power cord, is very substantial on the front end of capital costs. Also, operating at higher efficiency levels because your power supply is operating at a higher load level can reduce power and cooling costs. Using less space in the rack is obviously a benefit in all applications, eliminating the second vertical PDU and power cord is wonderful, simplifying cable management, improving airflow and organization, simplified power management because we’re managing one device, not two, and even reducing rack weight and floor loading can have seismic considerations.

This all adds up to a tremendous amount of savings. Here we illustrate a 60-amp load can deliver over $17,000 in savings over 5 years. One of the innovations, an important innovation in this 3-phase ATS, is dealing with unsynchronized sources. The nature of any date center A/B feed to a cabinet, is the sources are likely to be unsynchronized. Certainly you need to be able to plan for that. Tripp Lite deals with that with patent-pending architecture, patent-pending solution is the first of its kind to be able to deal with 3-phase unsynchronized sources at the rack level.

Any data center application is going to have accommodate unsynchronized sources, certainly in 3-phase. We do this: here we have scope traces dealing with unsynchronized sources, here from primary to secondary, and this slide from secondary back to primary, you can see very clearly that these phases, pre- and post-transition, are out of phase with respect to each other. All of this is accomplished reliably, and in under 6 milliseconds.

This reliability of course is a given. Efficiency is a given for anything you’re choosing to deploy, certainly at scale in your data center. Tripp Lite solutions here, reliability tested, proven in the field, thousands deployed today, delivering efficiency above 99%.

Again, choose your 3-phase ATS on the top half of this screen, 30, 50 or 60-amp varieties. Pair it with a vertical PDU to distribute that power to all of your equipment and you’re on your way.

I’m Dave Slotten, this is our 3-phase rack ATS at Tripp Lite, this is patent-pending, and we’d like to work with you on your next data center design.