Emerson Network Power released a new 480-volt power distribution unit — a voltage configuration that data center infrastructure experts have been clamoring for recently due to potential energy efficiency gains.

Typically an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) operates at 480 V, and a PDU steps down that power from 480 V to 208 V or 120 V. By eliminating the step-down transformer in the PDU by distributing power at 400 V/230 V and operating IT equipment at higher voltages the power chain would be more efficient.

The rack-sized Liebert FDC was designed for new high-density servers that can handle 480V power, including new models recently unveiled by IBM, said Bill Barcus, product manager, Liebert AC Power.

Data center managers can achieve an additional two percent energy savings by eliminating the step-down losses, according to Barcus. This doesn’t sound like much, but a data center with 1,000 servers could save around $40,000 annually.

Lately, infrastructure vendors are paying a lot of attention to distribution of power at higher voltages. Virtually all IT equipment is rated to work with input power voltages ranging from 100 volts (V) to 240 V alternating current (AC). The higher the voltage, the more efficiently the unit operates. However, most equipment is run off lower-voltage power: the traditional 120 V.

According to new research from Eaton, a Hewlett-Packard Co. ProLiant DL380 Generation 5 server, for example, operates at 82% efficiency at 120 V, 84% efficiency at 208 V, and 85% at 230 V. A data center could gain that incremental advantage just by changing the input power and the power distribution unit (PDU) in the rack.

“People say that virtually everything is coming at 208 V but they have lots of equipment coming in at 120 V,” said Peter Panfil, vice president of power engineering at Emerson’s Liebert Corp. “The IT people are more comfortable with 120 V, but there is no safety tradeoff.”

Robert McFarlane, data center design expert and principal at New York-based engineering firm Shen Milsom & Wilke Inc. offers advice for data center pros exploring this approach in the future. “The first step is to look at your servers,” he said. “See if they auto-sense 208 volts, and see what you can do about running 208 to your cabinets instead of 120. There are plenty of PDUs that will deliver 208 and 120 to the same strip if you wire it right.”

Taking the voltage directly to 480 and avoiding ther stepdown altogether is even more efficient. Vendors have been rolling out these products in Europe, but Chris Loeffler, product manager at Eaton said the main factor holding users back from distributing power at 400 V/230 V in the U.S. is that the equipment to handle these voltages is CE marked (it contains the manufacturer’s seal that it meets the European Union safety standards) but not approved by Underwriters Laboratories, the U.S. product testing and compliance organization.

“The global UPS manufacturers all make 400-volt systems, and we’ve done a number of Google data centers at 400 volt, bringing in our CE-marked equipment,” Loeffler said. “But UL means something for some people and you would have a tough time looking at this as a partial upgrade.”

Barcus said the typical panel board vendors use is UL listed for 240 volts — while they are rated higher internationally — but the new Liebert FDC uses a higher rated panel board, which is UL listed.

“We’ve had some queries from customers, but not a lot of sales yet,” Barcus said. “This is the tip of the iceberg.”

This is pretty impressive; colocation provider 365 Main has been taking advantage of Pacific Gas & Electic Corp.’s (PG&E) power saving program and saved $54,000 in utility costs at its San Francisco data center in 2007.

In all, 365 Main saved 7,477 kWh in 2007 by curtailing power usage below its energy-consumption baseline.

How did they do it? The first step 365 Main takes is inviting their utility provider, PG&E, into their data center at the start of each year for an energy audit to find areas where efficiencies can be added, said Miles Kelly, VP of corporate strategy at 365 Main.

“For example, this year we expanded the areas that utilize motion controlled lighting in the data center and also reinsulated the condenser water lines for the buildings massive air conditioning system. We also reduce lighting levels in public areas during peak days,” Kelly said.

The data center host also adjusted their weekly and monthly generator test schedules to peak days, which reduces their utility consumption by about 8% during test periods. “This adjustment of the testing schedule allows us to reduce utility consumption without ever affecting the reliability or N+1 redundancy of our power system,” Kelly said.

PG&E has gotten a lot of attention this past year for its part in promoting power savings in data centers. Their Critical Peak Pricing (CPP) program encourages data centers to cut back power consumption by offering seasonal discounts to customers that reduce or shift their energy usage away from peak periods.

In addition to savings incentives, PG&E also works with companies like IBM to consolidate servers, reduce heat and cooling requirements in data centers.

And 365 Main has been pretty aggressive in the “green” data center effort as well, if not for the public relations benefits alone. Earlier this year, 365 Main promised to build all its future data centers in line withLEED certification, which is basically a nice label the U.S. Green Building Council gives to companies that make an effort to be environmentally responsible. The standard is said to be tough for power hungry data center to meet though, and is most commonly achieved in buildings with lots of office space.

There’s been tons of clamour from environmental interest groups warning data center managers that if steps aren’t taken to reduce consumption, power availability problems will continue to grow and costs will rise, and several vendors and industry organizations have developed online tools to measure data center efficiency and promote power savings.

One of the many tools is from West Kingston, R.I.-based American Power Conversion (APC), a power and cooling services company, which has a free Web-based tool that rates data center power efficiency.

So, come on people. Let’s save some power.

Good ol’ Data Center Knowledge reported on a great database tool that lists a number of energy incentive programs for data centers.

The Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE) offers a comprehensive list of state, local, utility, and federal incentives that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. It maintains databases of incentives for both renewable energy and energy efficiency, broken down by state and utility. It’s a great resource for data centers looking for ways to cut back on power costs - which equates to pretty much everybody.

Pacific Gas & Electric was the first utility to offer rebates to business customers that implement virtualization and server consolidation projects.

Avista Utilities, the utility serving Spokane, Wash., offers rebates of up to $5,000 per rack for customers implementing a chip-level liquid cooling solution from SprayCool.

When I attended Emerson’s AdaptiveXchange show in Baltimore last week, I had a chance to see whether I could glean anything new about data center power and cooling strategies. While many presentations were pretty product oriented, I sat in on a few where the speakers made some compelling and strategic arguments. In particular B.J. Sonnenberg and Ed Miro — Emerson regional sales manager and product manager, respectively — gave an informative presentation on why 48-volt direct current (DC) is such a good idea.

The discussion was in the context of Power over Ethernet (PoE), which basically uses the communications infrastructure to power network devices, such as phones, security cameras and laptops. This kind of infrastructure works on a 48 V system; telco companies have used it for years. As Bob McFarlane’s power efficiency discussion at Data Center Decisions earlier this year highlighted, DC is a more efficient way to get power to equipment; using DC involves fewer power conversions, thus reducing power loss.

The argument is that if you have a 48 V infrastructure built into your system that is powering your office devices anyway, why not bring in 48 v power distribution units (PDUs) and power everything else? You get more efficient and reliable power and it can be centrally monitored and controlled. It’s certainly safe enough, a concern that was brought up during Sonnenberg and Miro’s discussion.

But the session ended before I could ask about the downsides (there are always downsides), so I asked a salesperson on the sales floor why more people aren’t doing this. He said that most hardware manufacturers don’t offer 48 V compatibility as a standard power connection. You have to request it and pay additional costs to make your equipment 48 V-ready. Also, 48-volt PDUs come at a premium (the salesperson didn’t know Emerson’s starting price because each application is unique, he said). And unless you need high availability, you can go with standard power and save money outfitting your data center with new equipment.

A new study by Opengate Data Systems, a data center availability consulting company, found that a 5 kw/rack data center would shut down in about three minutes if a power outage caused there to be no cooling. For a 10 kw/rack data center, the time is even shorter: about one minute.

The study on data center power outages was commissioned by Active Power, which makes flywheel and other non-battery based UPS devices for the data center. Much of the study was meant to promote Active Power’s CoolAir UPS, which can provide backup power and cooling in case of a shut down. But the data from Opengate is still pretty interesting.

Rackable Systems, Inc. was given the 2007 “LinuxWorld.com Product Excellence Award” in the category of “Most Innovative Hardware Solution” for its modular data center product, Concentro at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in California this week.

Rackable’s Concentro addresses the need for increased data center space while reducing up-front costs and operational expenses accociated with building a brick and mortar data center. The self-contained, fully portable data-center-in-a-box is packed with servers, storage and highly efficient cooling.

Sun Microsystems has a similar product called Project Blackbox.

Housed in a secure, nondescript, weather-tight 40’ x 8’ shipping container, Concentro can hold up to 1200U of servers or storage systems and compute density levels of up to 9600 cores and storage capacity of up to 3.5 petabytes. Concentro’s unique cooling and DC power technology dramatically reduce cooling costs by as much as 80% over traditional data centers, the company reports.

The ability to deploy a Concentro container rapidly and in any location allows businesses to add redundancy and business continuity, allowing for easy hardware migration and an expedited disaster recovery process. The units can be situated away from the home data center site and remotely managed at the server, rack and container level using Rackable Systems’ Roamer remote management technology.

Data center operator 365 Main Inc. issued information today detailing the root cause behind why back-up power generators in the company’s San Francisco facility failed to start during a PG&E power outage last week, leaving 40% of customers in the facility losing power to their equipment for up to 45 minutes.

It reportedly took customers including Craigslist and Second Life up to 11 hours to get back online when power was restored.

Following the power outage last week, three of 365 Main’s 10 back-up generators, manufactured by HiTec, failed to start up.

After days of testing they discovered a weakness in an essential component of the back-up generator system known as a DDEC (Detroit Diesel Electronic Controller).

A setting in the DDEC was not allowing the component to correctly reset its memory.

The problem was fixed and the Hitec generators successfully passed more than 50 consecutive start-up sequence tests without incident, according to 365 Main.

The company has a pretty good track record. Over the past five years, 365 Main has delivered 99.9967% power uptime to customers in five data centers, including the outage experienced in San Francisco last week.

The customers affected by the outage will receive rent abatements, as outlned in their service level agreements, the company said.

I wonder if the affected customers find the abatement adequate.

The data center hosting facility 365 Main in San Fransisco lost power last Tuesday and its generators failed to back up, causing downtime for the companies who bank on promises of uptime there.

After the outage, 365 Main had experts working non-stop to figure out why the generators didn’t fire up and found diesel engine synchronization failure and PDU issues. Hitec and 365 Main and trying to figure out the root cause of the failures.

It’s unfortunate that companies like Craigslist who pay for hosting services at 365 Main experienced downtime there. I’m sure the piece of mind they had disappeared when their data centers went dark last week.

At least 365 Main is going to route of full disclosure, continually updating the public on this issue on its website.

A San Francisco power outage caused a number of Web 2.0 companies to go quiet when it affected one of 365 Main’s data centers. Web 2.0 companies like Craigslist, Technorati, Yelp, TypePad and LiveJournal all got hit, according to Artur Bergman at O’Reilly.

You may remember when MySpace shut down last year because of the heat wave in the Los Angeles area.

However, power outages in and of themselves shouldn’t shut down data centers like 365 Main or MySpace. They’re supposed to have rock-hard reliability and redundancy built in. In the MySpace case, backup generators failed.

Meanwhile, 365 Main said their generators also failed to start when the power surge hit. It added that the data center was without power for about 45 minutes. The company has a good question-and-answer portion of the update where it reveals details such as that up to 40 percent of its customers were affected by the surge.

That can be one of the risks of outsourcing your data center: There’s a certain lack of control you have over your own IT equipment. Although if you were to build a data center with the redundancy that a place like 365 Main has, it would be quite a pricey venture.

Firefly Energy is developing a different kind of UPS battery that it says is lighter and more efficient than traditional lead-acid batteries.

The batteries use a lightweight carbon graphite foam rather than the lead metal grids to support the chemistry and conduct the electricity inside. The company claims that you can cut the number of your batteries in half if you use its product.

The company is working with partners now and hopes to have a UPS application in the next couple months. Commercializing the battery would take another 18 months, however, so it’s still a ways off.