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Product category: Enclosures and Racks
News Release from: American Power Conversion | Subject: High-Density Cooling Enclosure
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 21 March 2005

Enclosures keep their cool

A new enclosure incorporates innovative cooling technology that helps designers deploy high power densities in uncontrolled environments such as industrial plants and manufacturing facilities

American Power Conversion can now cool 15kW in a single rack enclosure. APC's High-Density Cooling Enclosure offers innovative cooling technology that helps companies quickly and effectively deploy high power densities in space constrained data centres and uncontrolled environments such as industrial plants and manufacturing facilities.

With the trend of technology compaction, lead by the introduction of blade and other high-density servers, many users experience difficulty providing adequate power and cooling in the IT environment.

This results in dangerous levels of heat with little practical means to remove it without drastically redesigning data centre space or attempting to mitigate heat buildup by adding more cooling capacity, a solution that is inherently inefficient.

By bringing cooling capability directly to the rack, blade and other high-density servers can be deployed into rooms not originally designed to handle these heat capacities.

APC's solution incorporates an innovative, patent pending horizontal airflow design.

Horizontal cooling provides a uniform curtain of cool air across the front of each piece of IT equipment regardless of its position in the enclosure.

The horizontal airflow design differs from bottom to top cooling methods that introduce the risk that equipment installed at the top of the rack will not get adequate cool air.

The system offers N+1 redundant, hot-swappable fans to ensure continuous operation.

In addition, the system includes an easy to replace cooling coil cartridge that lowers maintenance and service costs.

This high-density offering not only gives IT managers the ability to accommodate for increasing power and cooling needs but also provides them with the ability to deploy a solution to high-density issues in days without traditional requirements for data centre space.

'As manufacturers continue to reduce the physical size of their technology, more equipment can be housed within the same cabinet causing higher power requirements and more heat dissipation'.

'These new technology applications are leading to the creation of dangerous hot-spots within data centre racks', said Michael Adams, UK and Ireland Country Manager, APC.

'This new innovation gives IT managers up to 15kW of cooling in a single enclosure solving space constraint issues and gives users the ability to consolidate their IT equipment'.

According to Peter Furrer, Head of IT at Sauber Petronas, a Swiss Formula One racing team, APC's High-Density Cooling Enclosure proved to be the ideal solution to Sauber's high-density cooling issues.

'We were planning to deploy additional IT equipment that required us to power, protect, and cool up to 15kW per rack'.

'Our options were to either spread out the load taking up valuable floor space or find a solution that could effectively cool these high power densities', said Furrer.

'The APC High-Density Cooling Enclosures combined with APC's Symmetra PX UPS System has allowed us to deploy an independent, secure environment into our existing environment in only ten racks without having to build-out additional data centre infrastructure'.

'The solution provided us the ability to cool our high-density loads in the smallest footprint possible giving us tremendous installation flexibility and providing the level of protection and availability we required'.

The High-Density Cooling Enclosure uses chilled water, the most effective and environmentally-friendly way, to reject heat.

The water is contained within an isolated cooling circuit, eliminating the fear of leaks.

The system's doors are mechanically locked for security purposes and can be opened through smart card access.

An easy-to-use user interface display is located on the rear of the rack allowing operators to control and monitor the system.

Additionally, an integrated visual alarm provides warning of critical conditions such as fan failure, leak detection, temperature problem, as well as others.

Additional High-Density Enclosure options include: a range of single and three phase power distribution strips available for rack-mounted equipment; remote monitoring of cabinet temperature, humidity and alarm conditions such as fan failures and water leaks is available via APC's environmental monitoring unit; and a smoke detection unit (SDU) and/or fire detection unit (FDU) can be installed that releases a gas flood fire extinguishing agent to the cabinet in case of fire.

The FDU is linked to the cabinets environmental control system and will shut down power to the fans if a fire should occur.

The High-Density Cooling Enclosure system is currently available in Europe and will be available in North America during the second quarter of 2005.

The estimated resale pricing starts at $39,000-34,000, or GBP 24,000.

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