Industrial-strength solutions to reduce risk in the data center
ABB
An ABB white paper arguing that data centres, whose power profiles resemble industrial plants more than offices, should borrow industrial control and electrification practice to reduce risk.
On this page
Overview
The paper covers DCIM and control-system automation to reduce human error, role-based access, alarm management, condition-based maintenance with smart devices, IEC 61850 integration of electrical equipment, substation choices such as GIS, arc-flash hazard mitigation and fault-current limiting. The emphasis is on operational risk rather than detailed sizing.
The human-error case rests on the Ponemon 2010 survey: 51% of outages involved human error as a root cause, and 80% of respondents said some or all could have been prevented. Typical ROI for an industrial-grade control platform in a data centre is given as 12-18 months. It recommends alarm management per industry standards to avoid ignored, obscured or missing alarms during an incident, and promotes IEC 61850 as a common IEC/ANSI, Ethernet-based protocol for integrating MV/HV electrical equipment into DCIM.
Arc flash can exceed 30,000 °F, more than 2,000 arc-flash incidents per year are cited, and IEEE 1584 is named as the hazard-calculation standard. Splitting a 20 MW supply into two 10 MW flows is given as an example of reducing available fault energy. It is an industrial-solutions white paper whose figures are citations and illustrations.
Key points
- Ponemon 2010: 51% of outages involved human error as a root cause; 80% of respondents said some or all were preventable.
- Typical ROI for an industrial-grade control platform in a data centre is given as 12-18 months.
- Alarm management per industry standards is recommended to avoid ignored, obscured or missing alarms.
- IEC 61850 is promoted as a common Ethernet-based protocol for integrating MV/HV equipment into DCIM.
- Arc flash can exceed 30,000 °F; more than 2,000 incidents per year are cited; IEEE 1584 is the calculation standard.
- Splitting a 20 MW supply into two 10 MW flows is an example of reducing available fault energy.
Using it in design
- In the operations module include DCIM/EPMS integration points per device (protocol: Modbus, IEC 61850).
- When a single bus exceeds a configurable fault level, suggest splitting into separate buses or adding current-limiting devices to reduce arc-flash incident energy.
- Add alarm prioritisation and role-based control permissions to the commissioning checklist.
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Who should read it
Designers and operations managers seeking to reduce operational risk in data centre electrical and control systems.
Related standards
- IEC 61850
- IEEE 1584
- ANSI/TIA-942
Publication details
- Authors
- ABB
- Publisher
- ABB
- Year
- 2013
- Document language
- English
- Source type
- Manufacturer
- Access
- Free to read
- Licence
- Copyright retained; citation only — the publisher’s terms apply to the original document
Citation
ABB (2013). Industrial-strength solutions to reduce risk in the data center. ABB. https://library.e.abb.com/public/7095c28a039cb9e585257c4000553be3/ABB-796-WPO%20Data%20center-risk_FINAL_11-13-13.pdf
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Related sources
All sources on this topicABB 2013
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