Busway and Busbars | Legrand United Kingdom

Resilience needs to be designed into a data center from day one. However, if we focus specifically on busway systems, Starline products have been on the market for a long time, and they have an incredibly high mean time between failures (MTBF).

To put it in perspective, when you calculate MTBF based on the number of installed systems versus reported issues, the figure stands at around 700 years. This means that from a reliability standpoint, failures are extremely rare. But beyond reliability, there’s also the question of how quickly issues can be resolved. The major advantage of busway systems is their ability to support live, hot-swappable tap-off changes.

For example, if a customer needs to upgrade their power capacity, they don’t have to power down the entire system. Instead, they can remove an existing tap-off and replace it with a higher-rated unit—say, upgrading from a 32A single-phase to a 63A three-phase tap-off—without any downtime. That’s a major advantage over traditional cabling, where modifications typically require extended outages.

Now, if we’re talking about replacing an entire busway run, that would require some downtime. However, installation speed is significantly faster compared to conventional remote power panels (RPPs) with cable whips. So, overall, busways not only reduce the likelihood of downtime but also minimize its impact when upgrades or replacements are necessary.

And to add to that, another benefit of the Starline busway system is its modularity. If a data center starts with a 250A busway but later needs to scale up to 400A or 630A, they don’t have to replace everything. The tap-offs are designed to be compatible across the entire Starline T5 range, from 250A up to 1250A. This built-in scalability greatly enhances long-term resilience.