The digital economy in the UK accounts for over 7% of the country’s GDP. Leading providers such as AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, IBM, and Oracle have hyperscale facilities in the region and, as businesses shift towards digitalisation, the UK continues to be the largest market in Europe for colocation data centres. With many of these facilities filling huge warehouses upwards of 100,000sq ft and uptime absolutely critical to the industry, Crestchic Loadbanks is seeing increased demand for its range of mobile load testing solutions.
Paul Brickman, Sales and Marketing Director at Crestchic, explains, “Increasingly, data centre companies need to be able to carry out testing regimes on multiple back-up generators across a huge area. In particular, hyperscale data centres – which can have as many as 30 or 40 generators on a single site – need to be able to get around the site quickly and efficiently to maximise uptime and reliability.”
To address this issue, Crestchic introduced a trailer-mounted, containerised load bank solution earlier this year. Traditionally, applications that required a load bank to be moved regularly would need to use a low-loader, HGV or similar solution. The design of the trailer provides improved manoeuvrability and safety, as well as housing all the equipment necessary to connect the load bank to the generator, including test cables and auxiliary supply cables and motorised cable deployment.
Designed in conjunction with major players in the data centre market, the trailerised solution is proving popular in the marketplace, with a steady flow of orders in the UK and Europe.
Paul continues, “The UK is home to some of the largest data centres in Europe, with the likes of the Next Generation Data Centre in Wales and KAO Data Campus in Essex covering around 150,000sq ft of server space. In data centres that large, downtime is not an option. While some have their own private distribution network to power the site off grid, the enormity of the risks associated with downtime mean that all sites must have reliable back up power. Having trailer mounted load bank equipment which can be manuvered easily makes it easier to implement a regular testing regime and maintain uptime in the event of a power failure.”
For more information about the role of load banks in data centre continuity, or to find out more about the trailer mounted solution, visit www.crestchicloadbanks.com
Northbridge Industrial Services (LON:NBI) has two core activities, Crestchic Loadbanks and Tasman Oil Tools. Crestchic is a specialist electrical equipment business which manufactures, sells and rents loadbanks and transformers from its base in Burton on Trent and has depots in France, Germany, Belgium, UAE and Singapore. Crestchic also has satellite locations in China and the USA.
