Case Study: Multiple Comms Rooms UPS Protected at Luxury London Store

The luxury department store, Liberty, in the West End of London operates out of a Grade II listed building, designed in the 1920s. The company relies on its IT infrastructure and operates multiple comms rooms within the building.

Power Problem

Liberty required an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for each of its comms rooms, with a battery set that could run for several hours to ensure IT system uptime and continuity.

Site Challenges

Each comms room runs a mixture of IT loads, housed within either 2-post rack frames or a server cabinet. Powering multiple load connections always presents challenges. The first is to how best to size a UPS system and battery set. The second is one of power management. Each load requires plug-in connection to a UPS protected output socket. Any UPS system installed should also be flexible enough to accommodate future changes to the IT system.

Lifts operate within the building but final access to some of the rooms is via steps, meaning that each UPS system had to be safely lifted into position and assembled within the room.

Each comms room presents a different floor area and physical layout. An area was selected that placed the UPS system as near to the IT loads as possible, to reduce cable runs, whilst also avoiding installation underneath the wall mounted air conditioning units.

Access for UPS maintenance was also considered as well as the bypass arrangements to prevent downtime during a preventative maintenance or emergency response visit. Remote monitoring was another important aspect to discuss with the IT team as the comms rooms are unmanned.

The final consideration was timing. The store is open 6 days a week with opening times up to 9pm in the period leading up to Christmas. The preferred installation window was to be a midweek evening with the store opening for trading at 9am the following day, and employees arriving far earlier to prepare for their work that day.

Power Solution

A Power Audit was carried out as part of a site survey by the SRE projects team. This allowed our engineers to determine the overall size of UPS required for each room and plan out the electrical power cable management in terms of UPS input and output supplies, the location space for each UPS and interfacing to the local IP network.

The site engineering and maintenance that the UPS were placed in each floor prior to the installation start time. The installations consisted of CertaUPS C450R 3kVA UPS systems placed in each comms rooms as floor standing towers with 4-5 battery extension packs. Rack mounted bypasses were installed along with power distribution units (PDUs) with 16A commando plugs for the input supplies. The final handover was completed just after 12:30am, over 4 hours from arriving on site.

Two previously installed smaller UPS were removed from one of the comms room racks and repurposed for use in a server build & test room. All waste and packaging was removed for recycling.

The CertaUPS C450R UPS ensure that the comms rooms can operating during any power outage or prolonged mains power failure, for up to several hours. The UPS are automatically monitored by the local IT team via their SNMP IP connection points and the UPS will be maintained by the SRE team under a UPS maintenance contract providing preventative maintenance and emergency call out services.