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Santa Clara, CA, May 13, 2011 — Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, today introduced its first fully ‘Schneider Electric’ integrated line of modular data center architecture solutions. Schneider Electric’s new power and cooling facility modules complement data center IT infrastructures through manufactured facility systems that are a first of their kind in the market. Schneider Electric is uniquely positioned as an end-to-end facilities provider to address the need for fast, flexible, easy and predictable data center power and cooling solutions.

“Constructing a traditional data center from concept to deployment is unnecessarily complex, including the time, money and other resources involved in field construction and integration,” said Kevin Brown, Vice President, Data Center Global Offer and Strategy, Schneider Electric. “The introduction of our manufactured facility modules will simplify the data center process, from concept through deployment, in a predictable time and cost-efficient manner.”

Schneider Electric’s industry-first integrated system addresses the wide range of data center challenges, with solutions that are:

• Fast – Systems are verified for compliance for safety, energy efficiency, compatibility and security, reducing design cycles from months to weeks, installation from months to days, and commissioning from weeks to days.
• Flexible – Systems enable infrastructure to be deployed and scaled as needed to meet demand, instead of upfront deployment with no visibility to future needs. These systems can extend the life of current data centers in need of supplemental power and cooling and can be transported to new locations at the end of the data center’s lifecycle.
• Easy – Systems have factory verified operation instead of relying on field testing, have reliable lead times, and are tuned for maximum energy efficiency "out of the box".
• Predictable – Systems utilize manufactured systems limiting product defects and reducing overall design and installation time. All systems have software pre-programmed. These factors combine to make facility modules predictably more energy efficient than the typical traditional data center builds.

The new modular data center architecture features facility modules that can scale in increments of 500kW to match current and future data center requirements. By providing organizations with quickly deployable facility infrastructure along with a new generation of modular IT infrastructure, many available spaces can now be transformed into highly energy-efficient data centers in a shortened deployment time with predictable results.   Schneider Electric’s facility modules provide power and cooling infrastructure rapidly available for scalable and repeatable modular data center solutions, all while preserving 10 to 20 percent of initial capital expenditure spent during traditional data center deployment.

Facility Cooling Modules

Addressing varying data center cooling needs, Schneider Electric is offering two packaged systems to meet the cooling needs of any large data center facility.

• EcoBreeze - Chilled air cooling module which implements adaptable cooling based on environmental conditions and automatically selects either indirect evaporative cooling or air-to-air heat exchange, depending on external environments
• Chilled Water Cooling Module - consists of six modular high-efficient chillers, two economizers and a fully integrated pump house, providing comprehensive cooling solutions in less time with additional energy savings.

  • power protection;
  • equipment climate control;
  • environmental monitoring and security;
  • configuration of output power to meet various IT load demands;
  • real time measurements for improved planning and reporting; and
  • fully integrated power train from input to output.

Facility Power Module

Standardized and performance-tested, the new facility power modules incorporate critical data center infrastructure equipment including APC Symmetra® PX UPS, APC InRow® cooling, APC NetBotz® security and environmental management, Square D QED switchboards, and pre-programmed power management system software in order to deliver the following benefits:

Schneider Electric’s facility modules are pre-tested, pre-wired and UL-rated and reduce overall data center design and deployment time, versus a traditional approach that could take months or years to complete. Additionally, the risk of human error is greatly reduced during the construction phase and predictability is greatly increased. Schneider Electric’s new modules are competitively priced at less than $2 per watt and are available for sale today.