Glossary

Absorbtion Chiller

Absorption chillers source heat, for example solar, to generate energy required for cooling using a thermal compressor.

Adiabatic Cooling

Adiabatic cooling is a thermodynamic process where no heat is transferred to or from the working fluid. Conversely, a process is diabatic if it involves heat transfer either by addition or loss of heat to the surrounding environment.

Air-DRUPS

Air-DRUPS (Compressed Air, Diesel, Rotary Uninterruptible Power Supply) is a containerised 1MVA compressed air standby UPS system. In standby mode Air-DRUPS has no moving parts which increases energy efficiencies and lowers carbon emissions compared to other UPS alternatives.

Availability

A percentage that demonstrates the ratio of system uptime compared to downtime.

Blade Server

A blade server is an advanced alternative to the standard server rack configuration. Its slim modular structure is efficiently designed to reduce the physical space and power consumption levels within the data centre.

Blown Fibre

Blown Fibre is a high performance installation method whereby fibre optic cables are simply blown into fibre ducting over local and wide area environments.

Bunded Storage Tank

A bunded tank is a "tank within a tank" located within the generator to safely store fuel.

Carbon Offset

The act of carbon offsetting is to reduce carbon or greenhouse gas emissions in order to compensate for an emission made elsewhere, for example in the data centre.

CHAS

The Contractors Health and Safety Assessment Scheme (CHAS) is an independent body that demonstrates supplier compliance with health and safety law as part of the CDM regulations. CHAS offers guidance on such areas as safety management.

Cold Aisle Containment

A resourceful method of arranging racks and equipment to pool hot and cold air separately and reduce the mixing of the two different air streams. This arrangement allows greater capacities of up to 1-2kW per rack.

Combined Heat and Power (CHP)

Combined Heat and Power is a generator based on an eco-friendly fuel driven engine. This technology is most appropriate in buildings with high demand for electrical or thermal heat.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

Computational Fluid Dynamics, (CFD), is a powerful engineering method for the analysis and visualisation of fluid flows, such as air and water, which applies the fundamental physical laws governing the behaviour of fluids and heat to any environment. CFD presents clear descriptions of the complex intricacies of cooling airflows, as well as temperature and pressure distributions within all areas of any data centre, whether currently operational or hypothetical, providing the level of detail required for the most efficient design.

Constructionline

Constructionline is the Government's national register for pre-qualified contractors and consultants providing both financial standing and technical references.

Conventional Fibre

A conventional fibre communication system is a standard solution for installing optical fibre, which works similarly to other metal and composite cables.

COP

Coefficient of Performance (COP) is an efficiency ratio measuring the total proportion of heating or cooling provided by a unit against the energy consumed by the system. The higher the COP, the more highly efficient the heating or cooling system.

CRAC units

Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) systems monitor data centre temperature, humidity and airflow, consuming only 10% of data centre power.

Critical Load

A system that directly affects business operations so must be kept running even in the event of mains power failure.

DRUPS

DRUPS stands for Diesel Rotary UPS and is the combination of a diesel generator, flywheel UPS and electric motor as one unit.

E-DRUPS

A type of Diesel Rotary UPS manufactured by KST that comprises of a diesel generator coupled via an electric shaft to one or more electrical machines called "Rotabloc®", a power cabinet and a control cabinet.

EC Fan

An Electronically Computated Fan is a fan with a brushless DC motor. This technology is operated by converting a DC input power supply into the AC power required to drive the motor through commutating electronics, as opposed to traditional mechanical means. This eliminates the need for brushes within the motor and, being brushless, the motor is more efficient and reliable.

Flywheel Technology

Flywheel technology is a type of UPS that acts as a highly efficient short-term energy storage system by using kinetic energy as an alternative option to battery operated systems.

Free Cooling

Free cooling is an sustainable solution for cooling data centre facilities by using low external air temperatures to assist in chilling water. When temperature and humidity conditions are favourable air and water economisers can use up to 100% of outside ambient air temperatures to help meet specific data centre cooling requirements. It is a viable option for the majority of UK locations.

Fresh Air Cooling

Fresh Air Cooling refers to the use of cold ambient air to cool the data centre and exhausting hot air to ambient. Although this can be in combination with a second cooling medium, whether it be direct expansion, chiller water or otherwise, when operating in full fresh air economisation, no secondary or mechanical, cooling method is used; this is the key differential between Fresh Air other Free Cooling technologies.

FttX applications

Fibre-to-the-X refers to various types of high speed broadband network applications, for example, Fibre-to-the-Premise, Fibre-to-the-Home or Fibre-to-the-Curb.

Fuel Cell

A fuel cell is a device that uses hydrogen as a fuel to generate either ac or dc supply in addition to heat and water.

Fuel Cells

Fuel cells are an alternative power source for data centres specifically designed to improve overall system availability when compared with standby generators.

Generator

A Generator device protects complex operations in the data centre by automatically converting mechanical energy to electrical energy in response to unexpected power loss.

HVAC

HVAC stands for the Heating Ventilating and Contractors Association. It represents the interests of firms active in the design, installation, commissioning and maintenance of heating, ventilating, air conditioning and refrigeration (HVACR) products and equipment. HVCA members are subject to regular, third-party inspection and assessment to ensure their technical and commercial competence.

Integrated Physical Infrastructure

A concept developed to integrate complex connectivity systems into one clear, concise infrastructure. This organisation increases facility performance and reduces the physical everyday challenges of your data cabling and active equipment architecture.

Load Balancing

Load balancing is a term used to describe multiple web servers set up in a dedicated ‘web farm’ to provide a fast, consistent and reliable user experience.

Modularity

Modularity in the data centre means adding scalable power, cooling and connectivity components in a way that is responsive to client needs. As Data Centre power demand grows from a low density requirement to medium or high, new improved products can be recommended and the overall Data Centre infrastructure can be easily managed.

Multimode Fibre

Multimode optical fibre is a type of fibre used to transfer lower bandwidth communications over short distances using LED based equipment.

Parallel Optics

This fibre based technology employs multiple physical optical channels and multi-fibre connectors (MPO connectors) and is a recent trend that has developed to support higher speed applications in the network. In a parallel optics solution, multiple 10GbE optical channels using 850nm VCSELs (Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser) are combined to support a higher data rate in a multi-fibre single link. This technology is particularly suited to support the new 40GbE and 100GbE multi-mode fibre solutions that emerged in 2010.

PDU

Power Distribution Units are widely used in data centre facilities to evenly distribute electrical power. They are often combined with power and environmental monitoring devices.

PUE

Power Usage Effectiveness is a key measurement of data centre energy usage. It is a data centre sustainability standard promoted by The Green Grid to accurately measure the ratio of power delivered to data centre IT equipment against the total power used by the facility. The lower the measurement, the more energy efficient the facility.

Rotary UPS

A type of UPS that converts kinetic energy into electrical energy to power the critical load.

Server Rack

A server rack is a frame or enclosure for mounting multiple IT equipment modules. It minimizes floor space by stacking one above the other.

Singlemode Fibre

Singlemode refers to a type of optical fibre that quickly transmits high bandwidth data directly through one single laser beam.

TCO

Total Cost of Ownership demonstrates the cost to both build and operate a modern data centre including both capital and operational expenses.

Tier modelling

Tier modelling refers to specific guidelines for benchmarking data centre operational performance at each level of criticality. This system facilitates effective and appropriate design when planning a new data centre.

Tri-generation

Tri-generation extends CHP technology by producing three types of energy resources to generate power; electricity, heat and chilled water.

UPS

Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems provide high performance power protection for data centre IT hardware, automatically making power available from a separate source in the event of data centre power loss. It describes either a static or rotary system capable of maintaining power to a critical load for a defined amount of time.

Uptime

In a data centre facility uptime refers to the availability and time that a system is operational, compared to downtime, which denotes when a system in unavailable. A four tier scale has been developed by the Uptime Institute to determine data centre requirements with Tier 4 being the most robust.

Water-side Economiser

Water-side economisers are used as a free cooling system based on a chilled water infrastructure. Here heat is passively rejected from chilled water and is usually a process that precedes mechanical cooling.

WEEE regulations

The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive aims to reduce the amount of electrical equipment being produced and encourage reuse, recycle and recovery of products.

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