South Bend, Indiana - Global Access Point announced today the installation of new state-of-the-art motor generator UPS systems in their Union Station data center. Three years ago, we saw the great Northeast power outage shut down the power to tens of millions. Previously, we have experienced Hurricane Katrina and others devastate sections of the Gulf Coast. Our country has also dealt with tornadoes, floods and other natural disasters.
No matter where you live, you need to be prepared against the floods, fires, earthquakes, blizzards, hurricanes and human error that can interrupt power coming into a data center. There are local hazards as well, such as drivers hitting utility poles or transformer failures to contend with. Even when power isn't completely cut, summer afternoon brownouts, simple voltage swings or changes in frequency can wreak havoc on computers and critical equipment. These problems are compounded by the new rack-dense and blade server architectures. Although they allow companies to fit ever more computing capacity into the same square footage, they are also power-dense architectures, raising the demand not only for electricity to run the servers, but also to cool them.
Global Access Point understands the importance of protecting our customers computing environments. We have made a substantial investment to protect our customers and thier critical equipment from these types of problems. We have installed new redundant motor generator systems to protect the critical power for all customers at the Union Station colocation facility.
In addition to providing power during blackouts, brownouts and voltage sags or surges, these generators filter out line noise, harmonic distortion, high voltage spikes, switching transients (rapid increases in voltage) and frequency variations that affect power quality. This is due to our generators being mechanically isolated from the commercial power grid providing clean, uninterrupted power for our customers.
The generators are driven by industrial electric motors. The power for these motors is supplied by the commercial grid and backed up by traditional static UPS systems with batteries and diesel generators. When power to these motors is interrupted, the UPS will provide power to drive the motors and the diesel generator will be started. After a short start up delay (usually 8-10 seconds), the diesel generator will then continue to power the motors until commercial power has been restored.
On the output side, the motor generators are connected to a paralleling switch gear, which creates a common bus architecture that allows us to add capacity and redundancy as needed without having to interrupt our customers. This common bus architecture is also mirrored for the cooling systems which enables increased power and cooling to be balanced easily. In all, the system is designed to provide expansion capabilities up to a 2.5 megawatt critical load. Overall, Union Station has been engineered with a total growth capacity of 10 megawatts of gross power.
Consequently, Global Access Point's position in meeting increasing customer power needs, up to 600 watts per square foot, remains unrivaled from data suites to rack space.