Moxa Launches IEC 61850-3 Compliant Fanless vPAC Server Targeting Substation Environments to Enhance Management Efficiency

Industrial networking solutions provider Moxa has announced the DA-920E Series, the power industry’s first fanless industrial server compliant with IEC 61850-3. As a next-generation fanless computing platform purpose-built for substation environments, it delivers stable and reliable computing performance for virtualized protection, automation, and control (vPAC) architectures, serving as a key enabler for software-defined substations (SDS). This empowers power utilities to improve system flexibility, scalability, and management efficiency while enhancing integration capabilities across multi-vendor equipment and systems.

As energy transition and grid digitization accelerate, power companies worldwide are modernizing their grids and expanding renewable energy integration. With the rapid growth of offshore wind, utility-scale solar farms, and energy storage systems, utilities face the challenge of maintaining remote substations with limited personnel, while simultaneously ensuring power reliability and cybersecurity.

At the same time, substation protection, automation, and control (PAC) systems are transitioning from traditional hardware-centric architectures to modular software-based designs built on open standards. vPAC, as a pivotal technology in this transformation, enables protection, automation, and control functions to be deployed on shared, redundant virtualized platforms. This improves resource utilization efficiency and drives growing market demand for fanless vPAC servers that are both IEC 61850-compliant and highly reliable. The DA-920E Series has been developed in direct response to this trend.

Many modern substations operate unattended, especially those connected to distributed offshore wind farms or remote solar power plants. Traditional high-performance servers typically rely on mechanical fans for cooling, but in harsh environments with high temperatures and dust, fans are often among the most failure-prone components. Consequently, power companies and system operators are actively seeking solutions to a major industry challenge: how to increase automation and intelligence at the grid edge without increasing operational risks or maintenance burdens.

The Moxa DA-920E Series features a fanless passive cooling design. By eliminating mechanical cooling fans, it significantly reduces common hardware failure risks and enhances long-term system stability. Combined with a sealed enclosure design, it minimizes maintenance requirements and improves overall system availability—making it especially suitable for deployment in desert regions, offshore wind farms, mountainous areas, and other hard-to-access substation environments.

The DA-920E Series is meticulously engineered to maintain stable computing performance within an operating temperature range of -25°C to 55°C, preventing CPU throttling due to overheating. It offers high-performance processor configurations to meet the computational demands of vPAC and substation-level applications. Additionally, the DA-920E Series delivers deterministic performance required for mission-critical power applications, enabling utilities to deploy protection and automation applications on virtualized infrastructures while maintaining system stability and operational reliability.

As next-generation substations increasingly adopt localized decision-making, self-healing network capabilities, and advanced edge analytics, fanless vPAC platforms have become a critical computing foundation supporting these functions. This allows utilities to enhance intelligence while maintaining the high reliability and deterministic performance demanded by power systems.

The DA-920E Series fanless vPAC server is designed for IEC 61850 substation environments and meets other industrial certifications including IEC 60255, IEEE 1613, and EN 50121-4. It withstands exposure to extreme temperatures, dust, humidity, vibration, electromagnetic interference, and unstable power conditions. With the DA-920E Series, power utilities can confidently expand operations to unmanned and remote grid-edge substations, treating on-site edge computing platforms as critical infrastructure.

As vPAC solutions move from proof-of-concept to real-world deployment, platform reliability has become a crucial factor for the successful operation of software-defined substations. While protection and control functions are no longer constrained by the hardware limitations of physical intelligent electronic devices (IEDs), they still depend on a powerful and robust computing platform to ensure stable operation.

The DA-920E Series seamlessly integrates fanless cooling design, high-performance computing, and rugged IEC 61850-3 compliance to provide a stable and reliable computing foundation for vPAC systems. This helps power utilities accelerate the digitalization and modernization of substations.