JAYCOR is very proud to be an integral part of the construction and deployment of the South African National Space Agency’s (SANSA) new Space Weather Centre in the Western Cape, due to be completed and launched later this year.

SANSA was formed in 2010, however, South Africa’s involvement with space research and activities began much earlier, helping early international space efforts to observe Earth’s magnetic field at stations around the Southern parts of Africa.

The research and work carried out at SANSA focuses on space science, engineering and technology that can promote development, build human capital, and provide important national services. Much of this work involves monitoring the Sun, the Earth, and our surrounding environment, and utilizes the collected data to ensure that navigation, communication technology and weather forecasting and warning services function as intended.

JAYCOR earlier this year was awarded the tender to design, supply, construct, and commission the Space Weather Centre’s micro-data center. A central and key component of the hybrid cloud/on-prem solution SANSA requires to deploy the center’s mission-critical services.

The scope of work for the 36m2 micro-data center included all racks and related infrastructure, external and rack UPS’s, PDU’s, access control, cooling, environmental monitoring, and the fire-suppression systems. With all components to be managed with a Data Center Infrastructure (DCIM) asset management software. JAYCOR’s expertise in connected infrastructure and the flexibility and agility to deliver a turnkey solution to SANSA with best-in-class OEM brands, and solutions to meet the scope of work, were key factors in being selected as a partner on the project.

As we celebrate Space Exploration Day this week and edge closer to the completion of the project, we take this opportunity to commend and celebrate all the people, past and present, committed to the advancement of the space science. And look forward to the future as we help play a small role in the advancement of South Africa’s space agency and the sciences.

Greg Pokroy

CEO
JAYCOR International

Things like always-on technology, streaming content and cloud adoption are creating high demand for efficient, resilient and fast data centers that never let us down.

To meet these needs, dual-power feeds – two independent electrical feeds coming into a data center from the utility company – are becoming more common to reduce the chance of a complete outage (or not having enough power). This type of power set-up is often seen in Tier 4 data centers. If one of the two power sources suffers from an interruption, the other source will still supply power.

Generally labeled “A” and “B” feeds, each power source has not only its own utility feed, but also:

• A backup generator
• A switch that alternates between A and B feeds
• Electrical and distribution switchboards
• An uninterruptible power supply (UPS)
• A power distribution unit (PDU)
• Rack-level PDUs

At any one of these points along the chain, failure can occur. A true dual-power feed means that there are two separate sets of these components operating independently, reducing the likelihood of downtime due to failure.

Today, most mission-critical IT equipment, such as servers and switches, are also designed with at least dual power supplies. When everything is running normally, the equipment pulls power equally from both power feeds. In the event of an outage, however, the IT equipment can automatically switch all power to one feed or the other.

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About five years ago, the industry first heard about Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) – a method that was designed by eBay to help the company capture a holistic picture of their data center energy consumption and performance.

The initiative was then made public in an effort to assist other organizations establish their own data center energy consumption benchmarks and goals, and compare live system performance against those benchmarks and goals to determine actual efficiency levels.

While they tracking their data center’s power usage effectiveness (PUE), which illustrates how efficient a data center’s electrical and mechanical systems are, they felt like something was missing. Calculating PUE didn’t offer them insight into how efficiently their data center equipment (such as servers) was being used. The DSE initiative was formed to fill this gap.

Earlier this year, the team of eBay engineers who created the DSE initiative received a patent for it. With this news, we thought it would be a good time to revisit the data center productivity metric they introduced a few years ago. Even though it was created based on eBay’s core competency – e-commerce – there are still some lessons to be learned.

In eBay’s case, to measure performance and data center energy consumption, they chose to specifically measure how many online business transactions are completed per kilowatt-hour consumed. They calculated this by analyzing four metrics:

1. The type of performance they wanted to measure (transactions, or the number of online purchases and sales)
2. Cost per transaction (they measured cost per megawatt-hour, per user and per server)
3. Environmental impact (amount of carbon dioxide produced per transaction)
4. Revenue per transaction (they measured revenue per transaction, per megawatt-hour and per user)

Then they base their data center improvement goals around those metrics – goals like reducing cost per transaction by a certain percentage, for example, or increasing transactions per kilowatt-hour by a certain percentage.

The organization believes that, by substituting your own unique business metric in place of the metric they used – online business transactions – you’ll be able to create your own, unique way of measuring data center productivity and efficiency, too.

What performance metric could you use to measure and benchmark data center energy consumption? Here are a few ideas:

• Healthcare: number of patients seen or number of appointments set
• Hospitality: number of guests who stay onsite or number of reservations
• Manufacturing: number of widgets produced
• Financial: number of transactions

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