Schneider Electric launches containerised power and cooling facility modules.

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4 Jan 2012

Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, announced the release of two facility module power and cooling solutions for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region (EMEA). The new modular units enable data center power and cooling capacity to be added in 500kW increments, allowing physical infrastructure to be right-sized to the IT load and eliminating a major cause of inefficiency and wasted energy.

With leading power and cooling product brands including APC and Uniflair in its portfolio, Schneider Electric is uniquely positioned as an end-to-end solutions provider to address the need for fast, flexible, easy and predictable data center solutions. The new facility modules simplify the process of data center construction, removing unnecessary complexity as well as saving time, money and other resources involved in field construction and integration.

Tony Day, Director of Data Centre Projects and Professional Services at Schneider Electric said, "Facility modules are a step towards the commoditization of data center physical infrastructure. Customers can now expect additional capacity to be deployed within weeks as opposed to the earlier wait time of several months. Schneider Electric pre-engineers configure and test facility modules prior to delivery to the customers, thus ensuring reliability and efficiency. Site installation is also made simpler and speedier, reducing associated costs and the risk of human error."

The new integrated systems from Schneider Electric address contemporary data centre challenges throughout EMEA, with solutions that are:

• Fast - facility modules are verified for compliance for safety, energy efficiency, compatibility and security, reducing design cycles from months to weeks, installation from months to days, and reducing complexity in the whole commissioning process.
• Flexible - facility modules enable infrastructure to be deployed and scaled as needed to meet demand, instead of upfront deployment with no visibility to future needs. These systems can extend the life of current data centres in need of additional power and cooling and can be transported to new locations for reuse at the end of the data centre's lifecycle.
• Easy - facility modules have factory verified operation instead of relying on field testing, have reliable lead times, and are tuned for maximum energy efficiency "out of the box".
• Predictable - facility modules utilise manufactured components limiting product defects and reducing overall design and installation time. The enclosures are purpose-engineered with structural frames to meet data centre requirements - not converted ISO containers. All solutions have software pre-programmed and fully integrated management systems.

These factors combine to make facility modules predictably more energy efficient than typical traditional data center builds.

The new products join existing containerized data center infrastructure solutions by Schneider Electric including its EcoBreeze™ chilled air cooling module, and specialized power and cooling facility. EcoBreeze™ provides adaptable cooling based on environmental conditions, automatically selecting either indirect evaporative cooling or air-to-air heat exchange, depending on external environments.

White Paper 163 from Schneider Electric titled "Containerized Power and Cooling Modules for Data Centers" compares the cost of facility modules against traditional approaches to physical infrastructure, presents their respective advantages and disadvantages and identifies which environments can best leverage the facility module approach. The white paper can be downloaded at no cost from the Schneider Electric website.