Schneider Electric claims to have a revolutionary new approach to data center builds and expansions, bringing outstanding consistency and predictability to data centers. This new approach is formalized in the innovative Reference Design 21, one of over 70 designs in Schneider Electric's comprehensive Reference Design Library. This new design concept will provide data center owners – from colocation, cloud/ hosting, multi-tenant data centers to enterprise data centers – the flexibility and customization needed to meet cost and speed to market challenges.
“Today’s increasingly digital business environment is causing a rapidly growing demand for more flexible, scalable and quickly deployable data centers, leaving many businesses asking how they will meet this need while reducing total cost of ownership,†said Joe Reele, Vice President, Data Center Solutions Architects, Schneider Electric. “With this flexible design approach, Schneider Electric provides data center managers with the customizable design guidance they need to quickly right-size their facility without excessive capital overlay or risk, at a cost per KW entry point that is below industry standards.â€
Developed by Schneider Electric’s Data Center Service Provider team, this ultra-flexible design utilizes modular building blocks, easily scalable from 200kW to 3.6MW of capacity, or more, that can be implemented in a piecemeal fashion as individual solutions or a comprehensive, cohesive system.
The components can also be configured into layouts that fit the specific tier, scale, and cost requirements of data center designers, enabling them to decrease expenses, decrease time to market and reduce business risk. The heart of this design concept’s flexibility and scalability lies in the new prefabricated 1200kW (600kW + 600kW) Facility Power Skids and EcoBreeze Air Economizers.
The Facility Power Skids integrate UPSs, switchgear and management software in a compact, modular form while its unique output power bus design makes it easy to go from 2N to an N or N+1 configuration with double the power capacity. The cooling plant design employs an extremely efficient air delivery system bringing indirect, clean, and conditioned air to the data center utilizing two different economization modes.
Operating from a central location outside of the white space, EcoBreeze eliminates the need for CRAC or CRAH units, enabling data centers to achieve a low PUE, reduce OPEX, and, for multi-tenant data centers, frees-up valuable income-generating operating floor space. Easily implemented through incremental chunks as needed, this design can be easily configured to provide flexible data hall and IT rack design layouts including on slab, traditional raised floor and prefab.
Data center managers looking to optimize deployment speed, performance, reliability and cost have a pre-engineered reference point to realize significant improvements in: Flexibility and Scalability – Various module options and configurations, applicable to greenfield and brownfield data centers, enable the infrastructure to be deployed and scaled as necessary to meet demand. Speed of Deployment – Simplified building design options reduce complexity while streamlined pricing tools provide the ability to make informed decisions quickly.
Decreased Costs – Capital spending reductions result from the ability to right-size the data center as needed, eliminating complicated new construction or expensive building retrofits. Predictability – Prefabrication and factory testing reduces human error and on-site construction risks while improving compliance, safety, and efficiency. Design and manufacturing are closely coupled to greatly minimize uncertainty, which results in more predictable performance of the data center infrastructure.
