Our society has become highly dependent on electrical power. It is the underpinning of virtually everything we take for granted in everyday life at home, work, and in many cases, public transportation. Moreover, virtually all of the critical infrastructure for communications, security, as well as emergency services and life safety, depend on power.

Data centers are an integral component of our critical infrastructure. Traditional centralized large data centers have well established redundancy classifications and guidelines for back-up power requirements. However, more recently “edge” and distributed computing has become part of the data and network architecture, as well as to meet the increasing performance demands of mobile devices. This in turn created a need for “edge” data centers which are typically smaller and are situated in different areas than larger facilities, yet they still require back-up power systems to ensure continued operational status.

Climate change in general and record weather extremes will continue to increase the likelihood of utility power interruptions, as well as risks to life and property. In this new age, 100-year events are becoming common, making it clear that essentially no place is totally immune to natural risks. Therefore, reliable back-up power has become as important as primary utility service for data centers.

In this part of our series of webinars, we will examine the considerations when specifying and selecting back-up power systems for edge data centers.

Julius Neudorfer is the CTO and founder of North American Access Technologies, Inc. (NAAT). Based in Westchester NY, NAAT’s clients include Fortune 500 firms and government agencies. NAAT has been designing and implementing data center infrastructure and related technology projects for the last 25 years. He is a member of AFCOM, ASHRAE, IEEE, iMasons and The Green Grid. He is also an instructor for the US Department of Energy “Data Center Energy Practitioner” “DCEP” program. He developed and holds a U.S. patent for a high efficiency cooling system for rack mounted computer equipment. Julius writes the “Hot Aisle Insight” column at Mission Critical Magazine , and has also written numerous articles and whitepapers for various IT and data center publications and has presented seminars and webinars on data center power, cooling and energy efficiency.