Emerson to Consolidate Data Centers

Emerson Network Power will consolidate 100 data centers around the world into four facilities, including a new data center in St. Louis that will showcase the company’s cooling technologies, the company said this week. Emerson will also build new facilities in Marshalltown, Iowa; Singapore and a location in “Western Europe,” according to local media.

The new 35,000 square foot facility in the St. Louis area will be a testbed and demo center for Emerson’s latest technologies, according to company spokesman Steve Hassell. ”We want this St. Louis center to be not only a facility that runs the IT part of it but also to really be a showcase for Emerson products, and really the thought leadership that we’ve put into this area,” Hassell said.

Based on its plans for the data center architecture and technology infrastructure, Emerson said it anticipates the new St. Louis facility will receive LEED Silver Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The facility will have one of the largest roof-top solar arrays used by a data center, the company said, which will provide 100 kW power to the IT load. The data center, which is scheduled to open in summer 2009, will include three layers of redundancy, dual utility feeds, redundant UPS protection and onsite generators.

Emerson Launches Container for Telcos

Emerson Network Power (EMR) today unveiled its Containerized Computing Solution, a modular approach designed to help telecom companies deploy wireless and broadband services faster and cheaper. Emerson is positioning the product as a “central office in a box,” a slight variation on the recent “data center in a box” container-based solutions introduced by major server vendors such as Sun, Rackable and IBM.

Emerson introduced the Containerized Computing Solution today at the NXTcomm event in Las Vegas. The components included in a container include embedded computing and DC power conversion equipment, precision cooling units, power transfer switches, server racks and enclosures. Emerson Network Power has deployed containerized solutions, but they previously included only infrastructure equipment and not the embedded computing. The containers feature Emerson’s ATCA blade servers housed in a Knurr server cabinet, with power and cooling infrastructure from Liebert.

The new products are designed to help wireless companies expand their networks or quickly replace network infrastructure damaged in a disaster such as a tornado or hurricane. The FCC recently began requiring telecom and wireless companies to provide backup power for cell sites and remote telecom facilities. The new measures were prompted by an FCC review of telecom outages in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Emerson on Why Rack Design Matters

Do you ever stop to think about racks and rack design? The folks at Emerson Network Power’s Knurr unit have, and have put together a video discussing why racks matter and the trends that affect how a 19-inch rack is designed. Jeff Sturgeon, Vice President of Marketing and Solutions for Emerson, talks about how Knurr approaches rack design for optimal capacity, cooling and ease of equipment loading.

For more about Emerson, see our Liebert Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Liebert: High Density Will Drive Liquid Cooling

Will liquid cooling ever become a mainstream data center technology? Liquid solutions have shown modest growth in recent years, but resistance remains high in some quarters. A recent SearchDataCenter survey found that 65 percent of respondents said they would never use liquid cooling in their data center.

But the growth of high density blade server installations and virtualization may prompt a change of heart over time, according to Fred Stack, the vice president of marketing at Liebert Precision Cooling, a unit of Emerson Network Power. “The high-density cooling solutions are no longer a small experiment or niche market,” said Stack. “It is becoming a principal design embraced by many industries out there. There are still a fair number of data center operators that tend to spread out rather than design for high capacity. There’s some that have that extra (data center) capacity, but that number is shrinking fast. Some people are limited by the (power available from the) utility company.”

Since cooling represents a large chunk of the energy usage in many data centers, it is a critical focus for managers seeking energy efficienct gains. But there are many strategies to choose between when optimizing data center cooling. At what level do you optimize, for instance: at the room level, the rack level, or even the chip level? There are also choices of cooling agent: air or liquid? If it’s liquid cooling, water or refrigerant?

There’s no “one approach fits all” solution, according to Stack. “One of the first questions is whether you’re going to solve the problem on a rack basis or a room basis,” said Stack. “Then there’s the question of what kind of fluid to use. A very high percentage of the market is going to open architectures and pump refrigerants.”

Today’s Links: Liebert, APC-MGE, Rackable

There’s a lot of news today, so here’s a quick rundown of some links that may be of interest:

• UPS Sales Help Emerson: Strong sales of Liebert UPS systems and data center cooling products helped Emerson Electric (EMR) report higher-than-expected quarterly profits. Emerson’s Network Power division, which includes Liebert power and cooling products, increased by 14 percent in the quarter. Growth for Emerson Network Power’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and precision cooling businesses was “in excess of 20 percent.”
• Lee, APC-MGE in Alliance: Lee Technologies, Inc. and APC-MGE have announced an alliance in which Lee Technologies will provide APC-MGE products and systems as part of its core offering. Founded in 1983, Lee Technologies protects technology infrastructure from disaster for some of the world’s most demanding government agencies, Fortune 1000 companies.
• Diesel Rules May Impact Generators: A federal rule limiting the use of sulfur in diesel fuel is taking effect, and could limit the performance of data center generators, as explained over at SearchDataCenter. The issue is that ultralow-sulfur diesel fuel has less energy content, so generators may be less responsive to sudden changes in load. Some experts express more concern than others, but given the recent attention to generator problems, this is important reading.
• Rackable Updates Storage Product: Rackable Systems (RACK) has launched a new generation of high-performance clustered storage appliances. The company’s new Eco-Logical storage products feature high-efficiency, low-power consumption and intelligent design intended to improve price performance per watt, eWEEK reports.

Emerson Joins The Green Grid

Emerson (EMR), the parent company of data center cooling vendor Liebert, has joined The Green Grid, the non-profit consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers. Emerson said it will participate as a contributing member, and will work closely with other Green Grid members to develop meaningful operating standards and metrics for to improve the energy efficiency of data centers.

“With our active membership to this important industry consortium, Emerson has a new platform for sharing our proven experience and joining forces on energy efficient solutions that will have a broader impact across the industry than any single company could accomplish,” said David Farr, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Emerson

Member companies currently sitting on The Green Grid’s board of directors include HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, APC, Dell, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems and VMware.

Liebert Expands Fluid Dynamics Offering

Data center cooling vendor Liebert is partnering with 3D modeling specialist Future Facilities to provide advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools to analyze the air flow within customer data centers. CFD modeling has become an increasingly important technology for companies trying to manage high heat loads in existing data centers, providing precise information about the flow of chilled air through a facility.

Liebert, a business of Emerson Network Power (EMR), will gain access to Future Facilities’ 6SigmaDC suite of software products, which will help the Liebert design team evaluate the ventilation performance of new and existing data centers.

“Proper planning for power and cooling needs is the number one issue facing today`s data center managers,” said Fred Stack, vice president of marketing, Liebert business, Emerson Network Power. “Future Facilities` success in integrating the complex strands of CAD, CFD and load capacity management will complement our data center environmental assessment activities, which are designed to help customers understand their current status and provide them a change management tool for analyzing data center evolution.”

Liebert Media Site Defaced by Hackers

Cooling equipment manufacturer Liebert has restored the media relations area of its web site, which was defaced by hackers Tuesday. I first noticed this while checking RSS feeds last night. Instead of corporate news or product-related press releases, the entries in the Liebert feed said “hacked by …” followed by the handles of two hackers, who substituted their names for the headlines on the company’s press releases which in turn were broadcast to recipients of the company’s RSS feed.

Liebert isn’t alone, as the same attackers appear to have defaced press releases on several other sites using ASP-based content management systems.

Liebert Raises Prices on UPS Batteries

Citing higher costs of lead, Liebert last week announced a price increase for UPS batteries and battery cabinets. The increase, which averages 7 percent and takes effect Jan. 8, affects Emerson’s Liebert brand of three-phase and Nfinity single-phase UPS models.

“Lead costs are rising at a rapid rate,” said Scott Dysert, president of Liebert North America. “We are proactively collaborating with our suppliers to implement various productivity and cost improvements in an effort minimize the impact of the rising costs on our customers. We will continue to identify and evaluate other areas for cost containment.”