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Managing a data center involves striking balances. Owners and operators weigh reliability, availability, and other business requirements against capital and operational expenses to find the most efficient ways to design and run their data centers. As with nearly all decision-making, the more accurate and tailored the information they have, the smarter the decisions they can make.

In this white paper, The Green Grid takes a closer look at the guidelines currently available for data center owners and operators to use to determine the susceptibility of the power supply units (PSUs) in ICT equipment to disturbances and outages caused by momentary input voltage dropouts. The Green Grid evaluated the most historically accepted susceptibility guidelines – the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) curve – against the changing nature of today’s ICT equipment, including the diminishing power supply ride-through times and their often hidden effects on overall data center efficiency.

This white paper provides The Green Grid’s findings, descriptions of various data center power distribution system configurations, and a discussion of onsite renewable energy generation, microgrids, and existing standards related to the ITIC curve. The Green Grid also lays out recommended next steps for the industry to take to ultimately give data center owners and operators better information that they can use to design for efficiency as well as reliability.