New-Tech Europe | September 2016 | Digital Edition

way to realize significant energy savings. Such virtualization of the power infrastructure makes power an elastic resource and can improve utilization by up to 50% within the existing power footprint. This not only means improved efficiency in terms of the power consumed but also avoids the capital expenditure of bringing additional, and unnecessary, resources into play. Virtual Power Systems, a company that is championing Software Defined Power®, has recently partnered with CUI to extend its software solution into the hardware domain with an Intelligent Control of Energy (ICE) Block that will enhance the management of power sources within data centers and similar ecosystems. Conclusion The Internet of Everything will feed huge quantities of data into the Cloud, which must be processed quickly and stored for later reference. As the demands on cloud data centers increase, energy efficiency is becoming an increasingly important factor governing operating costs. At the board level, energy lost during power conversion can be reduced by adjusting bus voltages as load conditions change. PMBus-compatible converters allow real-time software- based control to achieve a valuable reduction in these losses. At the system-level, virtualization via a combination of optimized hardware and software will greatly improve power utilization in data centers as capacity demands continue to rise.

Figure 3. Potential advantages of Software Defined Power in data centers

22.2% of the input power to 19.6%. This not only represents a 12% reduction in power losses, but also relieves the load on the data-center cooling system thereby delivering extra energy savings. The Next Step: Improving Utilization Though Virtualization Understanding how data centers use power and then leveraging software to intelligently provision and manage that power is another

compatible front-end AC-DC power supplies such as CUI’s PSE-3000 and PSA-1100 and Novum® digital IBCs and non-isolated DC-DC digital POLs. Continuously optimizing the power- conversion architecture and bus voltages will yield improvements in each converter. In a power supply comprising a front-end AC/DC converter with average efficiency of 95%, an IBC operating at 93%, and a POL operating at 88%, an improvement of just 1% in each stage can reduce the power dissipated from

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