Power management vendor Eaton claims to have solved the problems of wasted power and over stretched budgets for smaller data centers with a ‘pay as you grow’ range of uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs).

The new 93PM product family is a modular range, which it claims will allow customers to build data centers by increments.

Eaton said the modules have been designed to work more efficiently together, in a process that cuts the traditional leakage problem that arises when UPSs are run below their capacity.

Jorma Mannerkoski, Eaton’s sales VP for northern Europe, said that smaller data centers have complained that buying a UPS has become a risky undertaking in a market which changes increasingly rapidly.

Mannerkoski said the UPS market is in danger of stagnating because UPS purchases are a long-term capital expenditure where demand for capacity is tough to predict.

Eaton has spent 18 months developing modules that can be aggregated without sacrificing efficiency, she said.

The ratings in the portfolio range from 30 to 200kW and include the Eaton energy saver system (ESS) and HotSync, a feature that helps the collective of UPS units to adjust to power conditions without power loss.

“Previously, if you had excess UPS capacity the load would be spread across the units. The lower the load, the less efficiently they run,” explained Mannerkoski.

Eaton said it has solved this problem by designing a system that allows one unit to run at near full capacity and the other to go into sleep mode.

“The new system pushed the UPS up the efficiency curve,” Mannerkoski said.

Companies have been forced to sacrifice money and CO2 in order to guarantee uptime, explained Cyrille Brisson, VP of Eaton’s EMEA power quality business.

“This is no longer the case,” Brisson said.

Eaton’s Hot Sync wireless paralleling technology means a system can be designed, or scaled up to, 800kW, maximizing availability without compromising resilience and reliability.

Energy Saver System (ESS) mode automatically matches the operation of the UPS to the incoming power quality, allowing an efficiency of 99% to be achieved.

If needed the ESS switches the UPS to double conversion mode in less than two milliseconds and delivers efficiency up to 97% while at the same time removing any abnormalities in the utility power. The new 93PM UPSs have a power factor of 1.0, according to Eaton.

Eaton’s Intelligent Power Manger (IPM) software is supplied as standard and integrates with major virtualization platforms including VMware vCenter, Microsoft Systems Center and Citrix Xencenter.