A Faster, Cost Effective Way to Deploy Pods of IT Racks in Data Centers

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As a Senior Research Analyst for Schneider Electric’s Science Center, I have the privilege to observe and work with our system design and application engineers daily. I am always inspired and impressed with their creativity and endless search to make things better, be it by: stronger performance, lower cost, greater efficiency, etc. Our competitive marketplace makes continuous improvement necessary, of course.

The Science Center is part of the CTO Office. We exist sort of as a neutral party to test and verify the system design and performance claimed by the Lines of Business. We use our quantitative research to develop best practices on how to plan, design, operate, and maintain data centers. And we typically publish that research for the public as free White Papers and TradeOff Tools.

A recent example of this type of work involved our new IT rack pod frame called, HyperPod. It’s a free-standing support structure designed to provide air containment to various shapes and sizes of racks while accommodating a variety of power and cooling architectures. Flexibility aside, it is supposed to make deploying pods of IT racks simpler, faster, and cost effective. But, is it really so? It was my team’s job to find out.

Measuring the Cost and Time to Deploy with Rack-ready Pods

We worked with our Design-Build Services team to map out a realistic project timeline and cost for building out the “white space” for a traditional 1.3 MW colocation data center. This involved a raised floor air plenum, perimeter cooling, cold-aisle air containment, 2N power distribution, and 6kW a rack average power density. We compared this to building out the same space using the HyperPod which greatly reduces overhead and underfloor construction and reduces the required raised flooring height.  We were very careful to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison to make sure we pinpointed the exact value of the new pod frame system. We based the HyperPod’s deployment timeline based on recent actual customer projects involving colocation data centers. Being a new solution where the installation teams had little experience, we think our timeline for deploying HyperPod is very conservative. At any rate in our case study, we found that the rack-ready pod design, HyperPod frames reduced the time to deploy by 21% and was 15% lower cost than traditional methods.

Read the Case Study to Learn More About Our HyperPod Benefit Analysis

I encourage you to read White Paper 263 to understand the methodology and assumptions behind exactly how these significant savings are achieved. Also, watch this video to understand how by implementing a free-standing frame for racks with IT – built in parallel to pod assembly – can mean significant time savings for your data center.