Cooling, power and network infrastructure solutions from APC by Schneider

4 December 2009

Insufficient cooling, unreliable power and the high-density of server and storage equipment inherent in today’s datacentres are fast becoming the three most common causes of IT equipment failure.

Craig Heidemann, APC product manager at Tarsus Technologies points out, “Most customers aren’t even aware of the fact that they’re walking a road that ends in data loss, downtime and the potential for lost revenue and brand damage if they don’t cater for their datacentre’s cooling, power and equipment density needs.”

Heidemann says for this reason, Tarsus and its resellers have begun focusing heavily on educating customers around the benefits of using racks and server cabinets that make use of the highest quality cooling and power reticulation technologies.

The focus falls squarely on solutions from APC by Schneider, since these are brand-agnostic when it comes to the hardware that the customer intends installing, however, at the same time are more tolerant of higher-end requirements from a cooling and power provision perspective than many OEMs’ solutions.

“The APC InfraStruXure solution is a perfect example of this,” he continues, “integrating power, cooling, rack, management and services into a single, modular offering that gives customers the ability to build an on-demand architecture for their business-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI) out of standardised building blocks.

“Other great examples include APC’s single Enviro racks used in concert with an in-row cooling solution (perfect for blade environments) and backup power provided by an APC UPS – giving customers the best of all worlds in an easily-configurable package,” he adds.

While using the right components to build the datacentre’s physical infrastructure (networking, power and cooling) so that it adequately supports the hardware that the customer plans to put in the datacentre is one thing – adequately sizing the solution is another task altogether.

“Resellers therefore need to become experts in finding out exactly what their customers’ current needs are, what their ambitions for growth are and how soon they anticipate having to add capacity to their datacentre to accommodate this growth,” Heidemann says.

“Customers must be honest with themselves and their resellers about these things, since not adequately catering for the needs of their datacentre will only catch up with them in the months and years to come,” he adds.

While Heidemann admits that power, cooling and networking reticulation aren’t the sexiest markets to be involved in, their importance cannot be overstated.

“The world is coming to rely on IT more and more every day and it’s clear that customers need to treat their datacentre architecture in the same way they would a disaster recovery environment – there can no longer be any room for error, since when things go wrong, money, customers and brand awareness are at risk,” he states.

“Customers must realise that they’re putting their company’s mission critical systems and data in jeopardy if they take short-cuts,” he concludes.