Simulating impact

The impact simulation provides an indication of issues or potential issues with the active power and cooling configuration in the event of a failure.

You can use the simulate impact option to simulate a failure to determine whether the design is strong enough to fit the requirements of the real-world infrastructure.

Note: The simulation is only as accurate as the source information (the data provided in the data center model). A simulation, although a helpful and informative tool, may not be accurate and only shows eventual real effects.

123 Steps to...

Viewing the impact of a failing piece of equipment

Select a piece of equipment in the rack view or in the floor layout that:
- Supplies power to other equipment in the layout, for example a UPS, rack PDU or PDU
- Supplies cooling to other equipment in the layout, for example a row-based cooling unit
Right-click it, and select Simulate Impact to simulate failure and see the impact.
In the Simulated Impact table in the image below, the equipment that would be impacted is listed. The Status (Live) field is used for equipment that is associated with live devices and indicates the device status: OK, Failure, Critical, Error, Warning, Informational.

Note: If a piece of equipment has not been associated with a device, it will show as OK.

Viewing the impact of an active alarm

Select an alarm in the Alarms pane below the layout
Right-click it, and select Simulate Impact to see the impact if the live device that is reporting the alarm would fail

A list of equipment in the data center model that would be affected by the simulated failure pops up, including a description about what type of impact the failure would have, such as power loss, or power redundancy loss.

Simulated impact of cooling failure

Simulated impact of cooling failure is based on calculated inlet temperature for individual racks compared to the maximum target inlet temperature for the room. If the first value exceeds the latter, the impact will show as overheating all equipment in the rack.

The calculated inlet temperature for an individual rack can be seen by selecting the Cooling tab in the Floor Layout, and hovering over the rack to see the tool tip.

The inlet temperature is calculated as the high-level average inlet temperature for the rack. The calculations are not detailed enough to specify the temperature more precisely, such as floor, middle, or top of the rack.

In addition, the generic cooling prerequisites, assumptions, and design guidelines apply.

Simulated impact of power failure

Simulated impact of power failure on a selected PDU or UPS will give an indication of loss of redundancy, cooling (UPS) and power supply.

On rack PDUs and paired receptacles the Impact description will show how the load of the simulated failed equipment distributes onto the associated equipment if you have redundancy in your setup. This gives you an impression of any weak points in your design. In the picture (2) you can see that the failure of one rack PDU will result in an increased load leading to a total of 109% on the associated rack PDU.

In the Connected Breaker column you can se the which breaker is affected, the increased load and the exact location of the breaker.

See also

Filtering and finding equipment in simulated impact list

Exporting impact table

Configuring simulated impact layout

Configuring cooling impact preferences

In this article

Simulated impact of cooling failure

Simulated impact of power failure

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