A Look at the Vertiv Powerbar and High Powerbar for Overhead Power

Yesterday, we published our piece on Why Servers Are Using So Much Power. In the accompanying video, we showed off the Vertiv Powerbar solutions, including the High Powerbar. These provide a way to deliver flexible power to racks overhead. If you have never seen these in action, they are a bit different than the older methods of running power under a raised floor and easier to swap.

We showed some video of this, including Patrick installing a tap-off box at around 10:10 in the video yesterday:

Here is the lower-capacity Vertiv Powerbar.

The tap-off boxes are designed so they physically engage the bar’s electrical pathways only if they are installed properly with the handle on top moving levers on the other side of the box.

One of the big advantages is that you can configure the boxes for different breakers, plugs, and so forth by using a different box. For example, here is a dual L5-20R tap-off box. A common installation setup would be to have one of these Powerbars for each of a rack’s A+B power feeds.

We had a photo of how the tap-off box latches onto the rail. As the handle is engaged, the physical latch grabs the Powerbar and the electrical fingers go into the designated Powerbar channels. We tried installing these improperly, and the handle would not engage. That is a safety feature.

There was another version, the High Powerbar. This is a version that can handle much more power, ranging from 1000A-5000A.

This has a slightly different locking mechanism for the boxes, but the idea is similar. They engage when they are aligned properly to do so. These are called bus plugs and are rated at up to 600A each.

These are designed not just for a handful of racks. Instead, this is a solution to deliver power through a data hall, or a hospital floor, or another high-power area. Since there are diverse buildings that these will go into, on of the features is not just the straight rail, but also the way the rails connect to one another, and are connected to other gear and the building.

Here is a great profile view from inside the training center. There are flanges designed to connect to switch gear, transformers, and so forth.

Here is the other end of the training High Powerbar.

Perhaps more interesting for folks might be to see a shot down the busbar.

Connecting multiple segments looks something like this coupler. There are other angled couplers and flanges that we did not get to see.

Still, it gives some idea of how these things are put together. One can imagine these running overhead. From these busbars one can place boxes where needed, and the types of boxes needed. That can be useful if you, for example, do a project to change the floor layout of a data center.

Vertiv has a number of different versions and attachments. Still, at STH, we use some colocation facilities with these overhead power distribution solutions and some with under-raised floor solutions. We have had some of these racks upgraded to higher power, and doing it with overhead Powerbars is much easier.

We thought our readers might like to see this kind of gear, since many have never seen anything like it.