Technology - Rack
The rack houses the servers and Ultraspeed uses specialist high-density racking provided by SGI which has a number of key features:
- Power availability and power redundancy. Power is available in abundance; each rack has three power feeds powering them, with each feed providing up to 8KW of power. Normal use per feed is 2-3kw; this leaves substantial headroom available on a per rack basis, enabling our architecture to deal with one power feed failure while remaining entirely operational.
- Convertor rectifiers. All three power feeds plug into Ultraspeed's AC/DC convertor rectifiers. Each rack is configured with two rectifier chassis in an active/active configuration (each power feed is plugged into both rectifiers). Each rectifier chassis has four rectifiers within it. Therefore, the architecture can handle the loss of one entire rectifier, or four singleton failures across both rectifiers. These rectifiers are individually monitored for power utilisation and performance, with the information being fed directly into Ultraspeed's Healthcheck monitoring system.
- Density. This kind of high-density, high-performance and high-availability design means that Ultraspeed uses far less data centre space than its competitors; this simply translates into a more efficient business model, with the savings ultimately being passed on to customers. There are no compromises in the Ultraspeed model; it is simply superior to what most of Ultraspeed’s competitors are doing, and will continue to do.
- Power efficiency. Our servers are directly DC powered; one of the major reasons behind this is for power efficiency. We convert to DC power at a rack level (see information above), and estimate that our conversion savings along the way amount to more than 30% power savings over a traditional lossy conversion chain.
