Red Energy to beat shutdowns

Australian
Tuesday July 13, 2010 Page: 39

A CRIPPLING power outage during the 2007 Victorian bushfires cost Red Energy thousands of dollars in lost productivity and sales, but put them on the road to meeting their future technology needs. The Australian-owned and opera ted energy retailer has experienced rapid growth from just four staff in 2004 to more than 300 today. The company supplies gas and renewable hydro-electricity sourced from the Snowy Hydro Electricity Scheme to more than 200,000 residential and business customers in Victoria, NSW and South Australia.

Red Energy is now wholly owned by the Snowy Hydro Ltd group. It has a main site in Richmond, Melbourne, and a satellite office in New Zealand. Having gradually added hardware to its server room, it ended up with disparate racks, servers and cooling units. Red Energy project transition manager Michael Cattenazzi said the data centre design was inefficient, at capacity and provided IT staff with little visibility and control. "We got to the point where we had seven minutes of available time in the event that we lost power", he said.

The 2007 bushfires saw a good part of Melbourne shutdown. "We got to the point then where power dropped completely, and all servers that were still up dropped", Mr Cattenazzi said. Red Energy had no communications or server accessibility during the event. "We were looking at least four hours that we were out of contact. Our customers couldn't contact us". The company brought in two portable air-conditioning units that were costly to run. "They have their failings as well because they extract an amount of humidity out of the air and therefore have to be emptied out every morning", Mr Cattenazzi said. "So you could come in on a Monday morning and server fans are screaming at you because they have got the rooms warmed up again".

Early last year, Red Energy looked at a solution to support its growing ICT demands. It opted to expand the server room and make provision for additional equipment. "As part of that, there was the need for making sure we had a proper UPS (uninterrupted power supply) system that could hold the business for at least an hour, and a proper cooling system that would cope with the demand of that particular room", Mr Cattenazzi said. Red Energy consulted with APC reseller Southern Cross Computer Services. "We had a general look around, but because of a relationship with Southern Cross and APC since the beginning of Red Energy, and the service that they provided, it was the logical step to continue the relationship", he said.

After a six-month implementation, which included expansion of its server room, Red Energy went live last September with APCs Infra Struxure data centre architecture consisting of pre-assembled components, including UPS, cooling, power distribution units, metered power rails and rack enclosures. As well as a 48 KVA (kilovoltamps) UPS, three 20kW In-Row Cooling units, two APC 40kW Aqua Cooler chillers and APC's environmental monitoring unit. The company has a highly efficient, scalable and reliable power and cooling capacity to support its business into the future.

Increased power redundancy from 12KV A to 32KVA with ability to expand to 48KVA gives increased uptime of more than an hour in the event of a power failure. It can closely monitor the data centre physical environment with key sensors and use remote management. "We effectively have the monitoring on our help desk and we can see how the systems are behaving and we get the alerts at critical stages giving us notice via SMS", Mr Cattenazzi said. The total project, which included construction and electrical work costs for the computer room, cost more than $350,000.