Technology / Rack

Ultraspeed uses specialist high-density racking (provided by SGI) to house the servers. Features include:

availability and redundancy

Power in abundance; each rack has three power feeds, with each feed providing up to 8KW of power. Normal use per feed is 2-3kw, leaving substantial headroom available per rack, enabling the architecture to deal with one power feed failure and still remain totally operational.

Convertor rectifiers

All three of the rack's power feeds plug into Ultraspeed's AC/DC convertor rectifiers. Each rack is configured with two rectifier chassis in an active/active configuration (with each power feed plugged into both rectifiers). Each rack chassis holds four rectifiers. All this means the system can still function with the loss of an entire rectifier, or with four singleton failures across both rectifiers. Each rectifier is monitored individually for power utilisation and performance, and the information is fed directly into Ultraspeed's UltraAlert monitoring system.

Density

This kind of high density, high performance and high availability rack design means that Ultraspeed uses far less data centre space than other hosting companies, which simply translates as a more efficient business model, with the savings being passed on to the client.

Power efficiency

Servers are directly DC powered; one of the major reasons behind this is power efficiency. As a result, conversion savings amount to more than 30% over a traditional lossy conversion chain.

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