Uninterruptable power supply (UPS) for CERNs new data center in Budapest Reference

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the world's leading laboratory for particle physics, and the Wigner Research Centre for Physics recently opened a new data centre in Budapes.

This facility hosts an extension for CERN computing resources, and is connected to the main CERN site with dedicated and redundant 100 Gbit/s circuits.

About 500 servers, 20,000 computing cores, and 5.5 Petabytes of storage are operational at the new site, which provides more than 18,000 units of usable rack space.

To meet the demands for an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), the contractors for the data centre turned to ALFA Power Solutions and its new Power Blue UPS.

“We chose Power Blue and its level 3 technology as tSE UPS for the new 1,200m2 data centre at the Wigner Research Centre in Budapest, providing a high power solution,” said Balázs Gál, managing director at EXTOR Elektronikai Kft. “The reasons of the choice were Power Blue’s excellent efficiency, helped by its eco and idle modes, and its potential to be used in the future with solar power.”

Power Blue’s efficiency is typically more than 96%, and can be as high as 99% in its ECO mode. TSE UPS also has an idle mode which helps increase efficiency, where the load depends on the modules that are in operation.

The new data centre is remotely managed from CERN. It extends the capabilities of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, which stores, distributes and analyses more than 25 Petabytes of data generated each year by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It also improves CERN’s infrastructure business continuity.