Technology center trumpets painless growth for power hungry data centers

Technology center trumpets painless growth for power hungry data centers

With its employees and representatives from the EPA, DoE, and The Green Grid looking on, APC-MGE (West Kingston, RI), a provider of power and cooling services, recently announced the opening of its new Schneider Electric Technology Center in suburban St. Louis, MO. The center will serve as a test bed for APC-MGE’s customers to show IT managers what they need to do to reconfigure their data centers as they evolve from mainframe-centric to more distributed systems. It gives customers planning a data center design the latest technologies and the ability to perform what-if design scenarios to increase their confidence in the final design. The center offers world-class components, cooling designs, high-density containment options, and new power and cooling capacity management software, to help solve data center issues.

The Schneider Electric Technology Center enables customers to build efficient and cost effective data centers.

The cavernous 100,000-sq-ft multimillion-dollar center incorporates a state-of-the-art executive briefing and conference center, live data center demonstration rooms, environmental test chambers, training areas, and research and development testing. The impetus for its construction was the severe pressure on data centers to find ways to lower the cost of powering and improving cooling of data centers.

Predictions from research firms like Gartner (Stamford, CT) say 50% of data centers won’t have enough power to handle their future needs, while other predictions by industry experts say that the cost of powering and cooling data centers will soon surpass the cost of the data center equipment. This new design center aims to keep cost increases and any decreased performance from happening by offering both applied research and practical testing.

The company says the live testing of customer-specific physical infrastructure designs at the center will dramatically enhance the customer’s ability to design and build data centers and ultimately enhance the effectiveness and performance of an installation. The facility is available to qualified testing and for appropriate third parties enhancing the science of power and cooling issues in today’s data centers. To learn more about the Technology Center and APC’s solutions, visit www.apc.com or call 800-877-4080.

Paul O’Shea