Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

At the end of every year, I make it a point to review our blog readership detail to see which topics you, our audience, find the most interesting. The Schneider Electric and APC blogs continue to be recognized in the marketplace as a great source of thought leadership and information on data center solutions ; perspectives from hundreds of global bloggers creates a rich platform for exchanging ideas. In 2019, four topics in particular stood out to our readers. My bet is that many of you will be able to glean solid insights from these trending topics for your own organization. 1. Sustainability Efforts Ramp Up with Renewables Blog posts that covered how to leverage renewable energy garnered a lot of attention. In fact, many colocation and service providers are moving quickly to implement renewables in order to drive down their energy costs. In particular, this blog features the new marketplace initiatives that are now influencing the growth of renewable energy systems. As you wou...

Time to Save Alice: 2019 in Review  All too often, software patents stop more innovation than they promote. Patents are legal instruments that can be used to sue people and companies for creating, selling, or using software. Very often, the entities wielding software patents are “patent trolls”—companies that make money off suing and threatening to sue others instead of building or doing anything of their own. We’ve been advocating against problematic patents, particularly in software, for many years. In the past few years, it’s fair to say that patent trolls have been down—but not out. Two big changes that happened several years ago have made it realistic, finally, to get bad patents kicked out of the system. The first is the creation of the inter partes review system , in 2012; and next, the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision , in 2014. Unfortunately, 2019 has shown us that we need to keep working to protect the patent system. Congress and the U.S. Patent Office ha...

Last year I wrote a blog about open standards organizations like Open Compute Project (OCP) and Open19, and the power architectures that are emerging from these groups – specifically, the consolidation of server power supplies into rack-level power supplies. I also introduced a TradeOff Tool calculator that we had created to demonstrate the efficiency impact of different server power architectures. The tool shows that there’s a small efficiency improvement in going from internal server PSUs to consolidated 12VDC rack-level PSUs, and another incremental improvement going from 12VDC rack-level PSUs to 48VDC rack-level PSUs. I want to address why we’re seeing this 48VDC trend. Why 48VDC? Simply put, it stems from the desire for increased compute performance. Take a look at the figure below from Google that highlights the last 40 years of chip performance (blue data points). Source: Open Compute Summit presentation by Google (original data up to 2010 by M. Horowitz et al, 2010 to 20...

Servo Motors Servo Motors are simple electric motors which are controlled for specific angular rotation with the help of an additional servomechanism. They are a combination of particular parts which include DC and AC motors. They are used in a closed loop mechanism which registers its position feedback to control its rotational speed. However, nowadays, servo motors consist of large industrial applications for controlling purposes. They are majorly seen in remote-controlled toy cars to monitor the motion. These are also used in CD or DVD players as the motor which moves its tray. Apart from these devices, we see hundreds of servo motors being used in our daily lives. Simple servo motors use DC motors and position them accordingly through a potentiometer. A servo motor moves at high speed, until and unless it is stopped at a designated position or by the controller. These kind of servo motors are favorite in radio-controlled devices such as model aircraft and toy cars. The servo mo...