Critical to analyzing a power issue is finding out what happened and how to avoid the occurrence again. Finding out what happened is the challenge. The speed at which data needs to be reviewed is so fast that System Event Reconstruction (SER) technology is the best way to capture it. SER can be built into the facility’s power monitoring system optimizing the value of that system.

The key to successful SER is time-stamping events to the millisecond. Such granularity can help determine the cause of issues and what the performance level was prior to the issue occurring. This information will prove valuable to getting the data center back to its proper performance level as well as helping to prevent future incidents.

The Modular Market

While the modular market is still fairly young, there has been some tremendous innovation and engineering design efforts put into solutions.  As engineered solutions continue to grow the adoption from businesses of all sizes continue to grow as well.

Many of the major server vendors have modular data center products and while they are optimized to work with their hardware, will typically support anything a standard rack supports. Vendors worldwide have engineered their own version of a container or module and incorporated a variety of unique capabilities into their solution. Having one vendor supply all components for and within the rack for a module enables them to engineer it as a complete solution that can then have modular power and cooling products complement the IT module.  Modular data center products, including containers, are available from: IO, HP, IBM, SGI, Dell, Cisco, Cirrascale, Bull, AST, Schneider Electric, PDI (acquired by Smiths Interconnect), Emerson Network Power, Silver Linings, and Telenetix.

Within the everything-as-a-Service model, a modular provider is able to offer the entire data center as a service, by quickly adding a module of IT with all supporting power and cooling infrastructure. The entire module is available as a package, integrating all aspects of the IT within and subsystems through DCIM or other management tools. Modular data center Providers include: IO, NxGen Modular, COLT, Cannon, Pacific Voice and Data, BladeRoom, Pelio & Associates, Dock IT, Lee Technologies (acquired by Schneider Electric), Datapod and Turbine Air Systems (TAS)/Celestica (CLS).

The entire Guide to Modular Data Centers white paper can be downloaded here, courtesy of IO.

DCK Guide to Modular Data Centers Home

The upcoming release of the InRow RA eliminates the use of water within the data center environment, mitigating the risk of leaks developing within the data center. This unique close-coupled cooling approach is floor-mounted and features a pumped refrigerant row-based system that uses thermal containment and smart controls to fully manage the cooling of the data center. The InRow RA is equipped with active response controls that allow for monitoring and active adjustment of cooling capacity.

Uniflair Chilled Water Air Conditioners are a perimeter cooling solution, and have been used in data centers throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America for many years. The units feature a compact footprint, highly efficient Electronically Commutated (EC) fans and a design that allows for easy access for service.

“As we continue to invest and expand our overall cooling portfolio globally, Schneider Electric has developed clear, competitive advantages in product reliability, efficiency and flexibility,” said Dave Guidette, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Systems and Services, Schneider Electric. “We are able to provide intelligent, network manageable cooling solutions that allow our customers to monitor and manage the temperature of their data center like never before. From perimeter or economizer cooling solutions, to our industry-leading InRow close coupled cooling approach, no other company can provide as many options to meet the needs and goals of any data center. No matter if the project is a brand new design or a data center that is retrofitting or expanding, our cooling portfolio has the appropriate solution for any scenario.”

Schneider Electric will display its complete line of cooling solutions at booth #801 AFCOM Data Center World Expo, which gets underway today at the Orlando World Center Marriott and Convention Center.

SX Side Airflow kit

The NetShelter SX Networking Enclosure and Side Airflow Solution Kit is designed to support the Cisco Nexus 7018 and provides hot and cold aisle isolation. The Cisco site preparation guide for the Cisco 7018 lists a requirement of 11 inches on each side of the chassis for side-to-side airflow. Cooling requirements for side airflow are needed, as the nearly 200 pound Nexus 7018 dissipates up to 51,195 BTU’s per hour. The APC side airflow kit is designed to work with these airflow requirements, while still allowing other components within the same rack to use typical front and back hot/cold airflow. The new kit is being displayed in a NetShelter enclosure at the Schneider booth #1537 at Cisco Live.

Design Guides and DesignXpert

Three new Design and Configuration guides were announced to assist Cisco channel partners to configure power requirements, select appropriate racks, address airflow issues, and suggest cable management solutions for Cisco products. Partnering with Netformx, APC has integrated solutions into their flagship DesignXpert platform. Designs created with DesignXpert, which include Cisco solutions up to 20Kw, now benefit from an automatically generated list of required APC products and services. ”We are delighted to further our partnership with APC by offering an automated way to accelerate the requirements-to-order process and enable IT resellers to recommend the optimal APC solutions when a design is created,” said Ittai Bareket, Chief Executive Officer, Netformx. “Ensuring that a complete and valid power and cooling solution is delivered as an integral part of the network design directly drives customer satisfaction and the ability to close business faster.”

EcoStruxure and EnergyWise

APC parent company Schneider Electric also announced that it has teamed with Cisco to provide an innovative comprehensive energy management solution that monitors and manages energy consumption across all building domains. Schneider’s EcoStruxure active energy management architecture portfolio integrates with Cisco EnergyWise embedded on the Cisco network infrastructure to provide a holistic building management solution, managing all energy-consuming building assets.

“Looking for innovative ways to increase energy efficiency and enable business performance within buildings is what Schneider Electric does every day with thousands of customers worldwide,” said Chris Curtis, president and CEO, Buildings Business, Schneider Electric. “Combining Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure architecture and Cisco EnergyWise provides organizations with the capability to go one step further and manage the energy consumption of IT/IP devices and PCs in the building management system domain for the first time. We are very excited about this opportunity and what our joint innovation will mean for reducing energy consumption in buildings across the globe.”

Neil Rasmussen of APC by Schneider says modular power and cooling will make traditional brick-and-mortar data center mechanical systems "obsolete" in coming years

Schneider Electric is jumping into the modular movement with both feet. Today the company is introducing new modular power and cooling products, reflecting the growing momentum for standardized, factory-built equipment designs that promise faster and cheaper deployment of data center space.

Schneider doesn’t view the market as tied to adoption of IT containers and  modules, either, according to Neil Rasmussen, the Vice President of Innovation at Schneider Electric.

“Modular power and cooling is suitable for every implementation, including traditional data centers, and will soon make other forms obsolete,” Rasmussen said in his keynote at The Uptime Symposium in Santa Clara, Calif. “In five years you may still see some data centers built in the traditional way, but there will be a lot fewer of them.”

Schneider’s new offerings include a power module that can provide UPS support, and will join Schneider’s cooling modules:

• The Chilled Water Cooling Module, announced today, consists of six modular chillers, two economizers and a fully integrated pump house, providing a comprehensive cooling solutions.
• Schneider’s EcoBreeze chilled air cooling module, introduced last December, implements adaptable cooling based on environmental conditions and automatically selects either indirect evaporative cooling or air-to-air heat exchange, depending on external environments.

Portable power and chiller modules are already available from other vendors, including competitors like Emerson Network Power, Actve Power and MultiStack. But given Schneider’s large customer base, the company’s new focus on modular deployment is likely to further raise awareness of modular facility design.

“Most of the supply chain in the data center industry is continuing to support the old designs,” said Rasmussen. “Modularity in and of itself is not a great benefit. But modularity is an enabler of standardization.”

The new modular data center architecture features facility modules that can scale in increments of 500kW to match current and future data center requirements.

Useful in Expansion Projects

“This approach will have lower cost and better performance,” said Rasmussen, who said the most effective use case may be in “overlays” that provide expansion power for existing data centers that have maxed out their utility power capacity. “These modular approaches are just as effective for indoor approaches and overlays.”

Rasmussen noted that some in the industry will continue to insist that traditional brick-and-mortar designs can be just as effective as modular deployments, particularly in cost efficiency.

“If you’re good, you can swim with an anvil around your neck, but there’s an easier way,” said Rasmussen.  “We believe this approcch is going to be a lot cheaper.”

Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) provide the critical power for computer equipment in modern data centers. UPS equipment is supplied from commercial power or local generator power, with multiple sources being switched in various arrangements to provide continuous power to that equipment. Such switching requires frequent circuit breaker operation.

By understanding and heeding theses basic guidelines you can improve the reliability of circuit breakers in your data centers. Click here to download this guideline for low voltage circuit breakers.

Currently, the typical 3-year cost (operating expenses + amortized capital expenses) of powering and cooling servers is approximately 1.5 times the cost of the server hardware itself, and the projections for 2012 go much higher. Energy efficiency measures are thus of high importance for data center designers, operators, and owners.

An energy reduction strategy involves a large amount of energy usage data and a large number of computations. This paper shows how the implementation of a hardware and software monitoring systems allows the gathering of energy usage data and the analysis of this data to achieve maximum energy savings. Click here to download this white paper.

APC by Schneider has introduced EcoBreeze, a cooling system that offers the choice of evaporative cooling or an air-to-air heat exchanger.

As fresh air cooling (economization) gains traction as an energy efficiency strategy, cooling vendors are incorporating it into their products. A new cooling system from APC by Schneider Electric allows data center operators to easily switch between several modes of free cooling. The EcoBreeze system, which made its debut last month in London, can automatically switch between air-to-air and indirect evaporative heat exchange. At the Gartner Data Center Conference, APC by Schneider’s Joe Capes provided a detailed overview of EcoBreeze and how it works. This video runs about 8 minutes.

The EcoBreeze is available in individual 50kw modules that can be grouped up to four modules (200kw) or eight modules (400kw) of sensible cooling. This modular, scalable approach enables customers to purchase only what they need to meet their current cooling requirements while giving them the ability to increase their cooling capacity at any time as their data center grows.

The EcoBreeze unit is desigend to live outside the data center and can automatically switch between two forms of economized cooling;

• Air-to-air heat exchange - Brings in hot IT air in from the data center through the modules EC (Electronically Commutated) fans which is then passed through internal channels of the Indirect Evaporative Cooler (IEC).  After the IT air is cooled it leaves the IEC and passes through a cooling coil and returned to the data center.
• Indirect evaporative heat exchange - When ambient temperatures can’t support a air-to-air heat exchange cooling is done through indirect evaporative cooling which removes heat from the IT air by evaporating water on the outside of the heat exchanger channels. The EcoBreeze prevents the outside air from coming in contact with the data center air, regardless of which cooling mode is used (air-to air or indirect evaporative).

The EcoBreeze has a proportional R410a refrigerant system as well as an onboard water treatment system which eliminates the need for chemical water treatment.  This feature addresses environmental concerns associated with some refrigerant or water based systems.  Both of the economization cooling strategies employed by the EcoBreeze maximize localized climate conditions to ensure the most efficient and effective form of cooling throughout the year.

“The EcoBreeze not only provides multiple types of air economization, but its modular design allows the unit to adapt to the future cooling needs of the data center,” said Pat Johnson, vice president, Rack and Cooling Solutions, APC.

Here’s APC’s vision of a data center with EcoBreeze units installed:

This illustration depicts an EcoBreeze installation, with the units situated outside the data center.

“APC pioneered scalable and modular data centers with the introduction of InfraStruxure in 2002 and we continue to invest and evolve the architecture,”” said Jim Simonelli, Chief Technology Officer, APC by Schneider Electric. “As data center challenges escalate with increasing server densities, virtualization, and a new focus on efficiency, it has become a priority for data center managers to align their power and cooling infrastructure designs with their IT requirements. This next generation of InfraStruxure makes it easier than ever before to meet these new dynamic challenges while achieving desired availability levels and deliver maximum efficiency.”

Modular Supercomputer at Nebraska
The new InfraStruxure system was announced at a Schneider Electric media event Tuesday in Chicago, which showcased the Holland Computing Center at the University of Nebraska, which is using InfraStruxure to power the Firefly supercomputer, which uses more than 1,150 compute nodes. The Holland center deploys 9×15 foot pods of InfraStruxure to house its gear, and uses the integrated APC hot-aisle containment system to run 11 racks of gear at up to 13 kilowatts per rack.

The Nebraska system is used to crunch datasets from the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator system housed at CERN in Switzerland. David Swanson, the director of the Holland Center, said the APC system has provided his facility with improved reliability, which has translated into improved productivity by allowing the supercomputer to run grid computing jobs from other institutions, in addition to the in-house data crunching at Nebraska.

Updated Management Software
As software becomes more important for data center infrastructure management (DCIM), APC by Schneider launched a new version of its InfraStruxure management software. The new features include:

• The Data Center Lab, a data center project management tool within InfraStruxure Capacity, which allows users to simulate changes and scenario planning without impacting data center operations. Drag and drop functionality and instant feedback on the impact of adding new IT gear makes the tool ideal for testing designs for floor layouts, rack layouts and inventory lists for data center expansion, consolidation or new build projects.
• An updated Impact Analysis application provides an instant overview of data center physical infrastructure operations including UPS, power distribution and cooling independent of the types and brands of equipment present in the data center. The application has enhanced alert functions allow managers to set operating thresholds. 
• InfraStuxure Efficiency 1.1 provides IT managers with reports on monthly energy consumption of their data center subsystems including CO2 emissions, PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and DCIE (Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency).
  The new network management tool within InfraStruxure Capacity provides insight into equipment dependencies including mapping and documenting fiber and copper networks from servers, via patch panels, to switches or routers allowing IT managers to document connectivity, manage their network structure and plan and control network usage.

An example of the increased integration capabilities of the software includes the real-time communication between InfraStruxure Operations 6.1 with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 via a PRO Pack. This new capability automatically migrates virtual machines to healthy, secure host server environments and provides visibility into how virtual machines relate to physical servers.

“We updated our InfraStruxure management software to provide not only critical monitoring and measurement but extensive operational upgrades to enable seamless implementation of virtualization and the reduction of overall carbon footprints,” said Soeren Brogaard Jensen, Vice President Enterprise Software, APC by Schneider Electric. “These upgrades allow customers to maximize current resources, conserve energy and better plan for the future.”

APC expands InRow Cooling. APC by Schneider Electric announced the InRow OA and Refrigerant Distribution Unit (RDU) pumped refrigerant cooling system. Meant for medium and high density applications in the data center the APC InRow OA provides an overhead, energy efficient, refrigerant based cooling solution that captures up to 27 kilowatts of hot exhaust air at the source, neutralizes it and discharges cool, ambient air to the IT space.  “The new APC InRow OA and RDU provide data center managers with increased flexibility by eliminating the need to remove or break-up racks to implement a row-based cooling architecture to meet the needs of higher density loads,” said Dave Guidette, senior vice president, Enterprise Systems, Services and Software at APC. The new APC InRow OA and Refrigerant Distribution Unit are currently available worldwide.

Emerson introduces new AC-DC power supply. Emerson Network Power (EMR) introduced the DS460S-3 bulk front end AC-DC power supply, which the company describes as a breakthrough in efficiency and density for applications that use distributed power architectures, such as computing, storage, networking, datacom and test and measurement systems. The 1U DS460S-3 can achieve a high typical conversion efficiency of 92 percent at 50 percent full load, which meets the Climate Savers Computing Gold standard.  The units are digitally programmable and DSP controlled.  The DS460S is available for $189 per unit in production quantities.

Cyberlink unveils Virtual Desktop. Managed hosting provider CyberlinkASP announced that it will begin offering fully managed virtual desktops utilizing Citrix XenDesktop technologies on the SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service platform. “Desktop virtualization and Citrix XenDesktop is being adopted by enterprises worldwide in order to transform the traditional form of desktop computing” said Sumit Dhawan, vice president of product marketing, XenDesktop product group at Citrix. “Businesses such as CyberlinkASP along with their collaboration with SoftLayer bring the power of desktop virtualization to enterprises who may not have the expertise to build their own virtual desktop infrastructure.” CyberlinkASP provides virtual desktops and back office applications for numerous small to medium sized businesses from its Dallas InfoMart datacenter.  The provisioning and cutover times for CyberlinkASP have now been reduced from weeks to a few hours with the partnership with SoftLayer.  CyberlinkASP and SoftLayer will also be linked via redundant 10 gigabit fiber, using SoftLayer’s network-within-a-network topology. SoftLayer and The Planet recently outlined merger plans.

RightScale announces Windows support for management platform. RightScale announced that the RightScale Cloud Management Platform now supports Microsoft Windows-based applications running in the cloud. “Windows applications, which are often developed with custom stacks, can present unique challenges when deployed in the cloud. With our latest release, Windows users can now leverage RightScale’s hallmark cloud automation and portability, address common Windows cloud issues, and manage user access and costs,” said RightScale CTO Thorsten von Eicken.  With the latest release of the management platform the processes for Windows server deployment, automation, management and portability can be orchestrated. RightScale has pre-configured numerous Server Templates and RightImages so users can get started in minutes instead of days or weeks. Thorsten von Eicken explains in a blog post Tuesday the arduous process of setting up these features and server templates for general availability.