Vendors Expand, Seeking One-Stop Shops

In the past several years we’ve seen a number of major deals among data center equipment vendors and service providers seeking to create a “one-stop shop,” hoping to build deeper relationships with their data center customers.

One of the biggest of these deals was Schneider Electric’s $6.1 billion acquisition of American Power Conversion (APC), which closed in early 2007. Schneider says it is beginning to leverage the company’s full array of data center offerings as it works with major data center operators.

“The thing that’s interesting now is the level of integration and breadth of offering we can bring to this,” said John de Pippo, a solutions VP at Schneider who also is a Senior VP for Software and Services at APC. “We can offer a lot of ways a customer can get energy efficiency throughout its operations. Schneider really has the ability to do that with all the resources it has.”

An example is the company’s relationship with Switch Communications, which is building the 407,000 square foot SuperNAP in Las Vegas. Switch is buying up to 60 APC 1.4 megawatt UPS units and potentially thousands of server racks, as well as Square D circuit breakers and controllers and Pelco security products.

APC to Provide More Energy Efficiency Info

APC has begun publishing detailed information about the electrical efficiency of its power and cooling products, the company said this week. Offering product efficiency data, including graphs on its products in a consistent format, will allow data center designers to combine the component efficiencies to predict the performance of an overall system.

APC has begun publishing data for its three-phase and single-phase uninterruptible power supplies, power distribution units and InRow cooling solutions on its Web site. An examples can be seen on this product page (scroll down to find “Energy Use/Efficiency), showing the equipment’s efficiency at a variety of loads.

APC Launches Data Center Planning Tools

APC today introduced TradeOff Tools, a group of web-based applications that allow data center professionals to experiment with numerous “what if” scenarios for virtualization, efficiency, power sizing, and other key design issues. The Flash-based tools let managers model different approaches and configurations to their data centers, allowing them to calculate Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE), potential gains from virtualization, and compare AC and DC power distribution.

APC unveiled the new tools today at a media presentation in West Kingston, Rhode Island. “The demand for higher densities, for higher efficiencies to defray rising energy costs, and for 7 x 24 x 365 uptime are taxing existing data centers with an unprecedented level of complexity,” APC said. “APC TradeOff Tools are designed to reduce complexity by helping data center professionals quickly identify their data center preferences and weigh those preferences against their budgetary and physical environment constraints.”

Seven different tools are now available on the web at tools.apc.com. They include:

• Data Center Energy Efficiency Calculator: This tool profiles a data center to calculate efficiency and electrical cost. As the user inputs details of the power and cooling configuration, and results are calculated based on a tested and validated three-parameter efficiency model.
• Data Center Capital Cost Calculator: This tool identifies calculates capital costs based on parameters including load, redundancy, density, and power/cooling characteristics, the tool can project the number of racks required and the floor space required.
• Power Sizing Calculator: This tool defines basic characteristics of the IT load and calculates how much utility input power would be required to support that load, allowing users to experiment with “what if” scenarios by modifying the load characteristics of servers, mainframes, and storage. Total load is then calculated and the tool generates a corresponding utility power requirement.

SanFran Hospital Buys APC Mobile Data Center

Amid the building buzz around containers, one of the earliest entrants in the mobile data center sector has sold its first unit. San Francisco General Hospital has purchased APC’s first InfraStruXure Express, a fully mobile data center in a 53-foot long trailer. APC introduced the “data center on wheels” in October 2004, a full two years before Sun Microsystems unveiled Project Blackbox.

The hospital will use the portable data center as expansion space while San Francisco General builds a new data center as part of a major rebuilding project. The new hospital facilities may not be completed until at least 2012, and perhaps 2015 - hence the need for InfraStruXure Express. The unit includes a network operations center (NOC), two Symmetra UPS systems, in-row cooling, and 11 NetShelter enclosures providing up to 500U of space.

“They are completely maxed out (of data center space)” said Dan Whelan of APC, part of the team that helped the hospital purchase and install the unit. The Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation provided a grant to support San Francisco General’s purchase of the InfraStruXure Express.

Schneider Opens Data Center Testbed Facility

The value of the new Schneider Electric Technology Center can be seen in the changing displays on the PowerLogic monitoring system mounted on the wall of the new facility in O’Fallon, Missouri. Engineers from APC-MGE first turn on a set of computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units to cool a module of racks. They then activate in-row cooling systems to cool a similar setup, allowing an instant comparison of perimeter cooling and in-row cooling technologies in a controlled environment. The gauges show that in this scenario, the in-row units used a fraction of the power.

Providing instant feedback on dueling approaches to power problems is one goal of the 100,000 square foot facility, which is designed as a testbed for Schneider and its customers and industry partners to design efficient approaches to power and cooling. The data center is equipped with the latest power efficiency technology and sturdy infrastructure to run high-density installations that have been problematic in legacy data centers.

“This will be a facility dedicated to practical solutions, not hype,” said Aaron Davis, chief marketing officer of APC-MGE, the U.S. unit of European power conglomerate Schneider Electric, which acquired APC for $6.1 billion last year. “We’re not making this investment saying APC has all the answers and solutions. We’re welcoming the community to come in and benefit from this investment.”

The Green Grid is one of the groups taking Schneider up on its invitation. Members of the group’s board were on hand Tuesday at a grand opening tour of the facility, which is designed to accommodate traditional customer testing but can also simulate extreme heat and cold environments.

“The data center market is very risk-averse,” said Don Lipton, the founder of SprayCool and one of the Green Grid board members in attendance. “You’ve got to have test centers and pilot projects so people can calculate the effectiveness and cost of new approaches.”

APC-MGE Partners With STULZ on Cooling

Power and cooling specialist APC-MGE has announced a partnership with Germany’s STULZ Gmbh to cross-market their products in cooling solutions for customers of both companies. The agreement will initially focus on countries in Europe, and later be expanded globally, the companies said.

STULZ specializes in precision technologies for perimeter cooling, while APC’s latest technology focuses on in-row cooling systems for high-density offerings. The partnership will allow the companies to offer full solutions for customers looking to improve the efficiency of their perimeter cooling while using in-row spot cooling to address “hot spots.”

STULZ uses an approach called Dynamic Free Cooling (DFC), an electronically controlled hybrid cooling system that uses free cooling (using chilled water from an outside water tower) to limit the use of the compressors within the computer room air conditioner (CRAC) unit. DFC tracks the outside temperature to determine when to turn the compressors on and off for optimum energy usage.

APC Offers Cooling Planning Tool

APC has introduced an online tool to help data center operators design cooling systems, allowing users to review options based upon their required load capacity and UPS configuration. The InfraStruXure Reference Design Gallery offers APC’s resellers and channel partners a quick way to evaluate a wide range of designs based on real-world installations from APC customers with similar requirements.

Neil Rasmussen, senior vice president and chief technology officer of APC-MGE, said the new tool “gives our channel partners and customers a valuable and tangible starting point for the planning of a data center. This design tool not only saves an incredible amount of costly time in the overall design process of a data center, but also greatly simplifies and clarifies the criteria and known business needs of our customers to help make key decisions related to data center planning.”

APC-MGE Readies New Efficient UPS

APC-MGE’s newest energy-efficient UPS (uninterruptible power supply) system doesn’t make its official debut until Data Center World in Dallas in September. But company officials offered a sneak peak at the new Symmetra PX 250-500kW unit at its annual editors’ event Friday in West Kingston, Rhode Island, in which energy efficiency and green data centers were central themes.

The new unit fills a niche between the company’s existing Symmetra PX models (which range from 10 t0 80kW), and APC-MGE’s Symmetra MW series for use at 400kW to 1.6 megawatts. The PX 250-500kW unit operates at 96 percent efficiency at 50 percent load, compared to 92 percent for existing PX line. “These new UPS systems dramatically improve energy efficiency,” said Neil Rasmussen, chief technical officer and a co-founder of APC. Rasmussen said an improved inverter design is responsible for the improved efficiency in the new Symmetra units.

APC Daylight Savings Time Issues?

The Internet Storm Center says it has received reports today of Daylight Savings Time problems with some versions of APC power management software. Here’s what the ISC is reporting:

“I have a box running APC Powerchute 7.0.5.108 on Windows Server 2003 SP1 that was scheduled to shutdown and restart one of my systems at 3:00 AM today but didn’t do the shutdown until 4:00 AM. According to my staff, APC had reported that earlier editions of Powerchute had a DST issue, but 7.0.5 was corrected, yet this doesn’t appear to be correct. The W2K3 server did update the time correctly to the new DST at 2:00 AM this morning and is reflecting the correct Eastern DST. … Since then, I have checked other W2K3 boxes with this Powerchute version and found that the change actually advanced my scheduled shutdown time by one hour rather than actually correcting DST. So it looks like a problem exists with Powerchute.” … So those of you that are running Powerchute software may want to check your systems.

As with most DST problems, this isn’t an operational showstopper, but if you’re trouble-shooting these issues today, it’s one to add to the checklist.

APC, IBM Team on Modular Data Center

American Power Conversion (APCC) and IBM have jointly developed the Scalable Modular Data Center, a pre-engineered 500 or 1,000 square foot data center that can be rapidly deployed. The new offering, similar in concept to Sun Microsystems’ Project BlackBox, enables users to build a data center in nearly any working environment using IBM Global Services’ capabilities and APC’s InfraStruXure data center architecture.

“Organizations of all sizes are currently experiencing significant challenges as a result of energy-related expenses within their data centers,” said Rob Johnson, APC’s president and chief executive officer. “The strategic relationship between IBM and APC will produce a reliable, scalable modular data center that will provide power, cooling, racks, security and management capabilities that directly address those energy challenges. From our experience in marketing products to small- and medium-sized businesses, we designed this solution to specifically meet the customer’s need for flexible infrastructure that can install in virtually any environment and still support the cost-effective addition of components as a business grows.”