All IT Rooms uses Legrand Data Center Solutions in Heerlen NL

The Dutch municipalities of Heerlen, Kerkrade, Landgraaf, Brunssum, Nuth, Voerendaal, Simpelveld and Onderbanken together form ‘Parkstad Limburg’. Within this partnership, the municipality of Heerlen plays a leading role in the field of ICT; all eight municipalities in Parkstad Limburg participate in the Heerlen data centres. In addition to scale enlargement, 24/7 online availability of the site is also important to the citizens. This places high demands on the data centre. Minkels partner All IT Rooms and Legrand Data Center Solutions were challenged to upgrade the server space of the municipality of Heerlen!

IMPROVING POWER SUPPLY

The municipality of Heerlen had the desire to improve the power supply of the city hall’s server space. Ronald Kok, Director of All IT Rooms: “The municipality of Heerlen has been a customer of All IT Rooms for a number of years. They asked us to think about a better redundancy, bearing in mind that all eight municipalities in Parkstad Limburg are participating in the Heerlen data centres.”

PRICE-QUALITY VERSUS SPACE

All IT Rooms assessed a number of UPS systems from different suppliers. “After a careful selection, we chose the UPS systems of ‘Legrand Data Center Solutions’ because of the good value for money. In addition, there was little room for a UPS system in the server space. The Legrand UPS has batteries that are placed internally in the cabinet. Other systems have batteries placed externally. As a result, Legrand’s footprint is smaller. With other UPSes, we would also need an additional cabinet for the batteries, plus UPS cabling for batteries. This all takes up space that wasn’t actually there”, said Kok.

LIVE ICT RENEWAL

In the old situation a single power supply was used. “Thus a single point of failure, which gives a higher risk of failure and reduces reliability. In a live and up-and-running ICT environment, we first built feed B and switched over to this feed. After that, we replaced feed A and redesigned it. In the new situation, both energy paths have their own UPS, resulting in a 2N solution. With this solution, we have adapted the data centre to the wishes of the municipality; we realised an increased availability and a reduced chance of errors. This redundancy is necessary in case of malfunction or maintenance work. Then the other feed will take over.”

LEGRAND DATA CENTER SOLUTIONS

As a system integrator, All IT Rooms works with a few brands. “Minkels has been a reliable partner for years and that led to our link to Legrand. Now that Minkels and Legrand offer their joint data centre solutions through the ‘Legrand Data Center Solutions’ teams, this has a big advantage; one single point of contact, offering a complete solution. Recently, we worked together on a project for the municipality of Krimpenerwaard. This experience with Minkels and Legrand made us decide to utilise this combination again during the project for the municipality of Heerlen. For the municipality of Heerlen we chose the Keor UPS system. We used the three-phase UPS with 60 kVA and five minutes of autonomy time. This means that the battery provides five minutes of backup time. This is enough because there is also an aggregate in Heerlen. Otherwise, a longer autonomy time would have been necessary.”

SUSTAINABLE AND MANAGEABLE

The municipality had one special demand: the installation had to be sustainable. “The Legrand UPS has a high efficiency of 96%. To ensure this, the consumption of the systems had to be measurable. This was a customer-specific demand and therefore required customisation: an external kilowatt hour meter had to be installed. The municipality has been able to make huge savings: from a decentralised solution with about 60 small UPSes to a central solution with one large UPS for each energy path. Furthermore, an increase in manageability and space has been realised, against a much lower energy consumption”, Kok concludes.