Schneider Electric announces new white paper ‘Determining the Power, Cooling, and space capacities when consolidating Data Centres’

Schneider has announced a new White Paper, “Determining the Power, Cooling, and Space Capacities when Consolidating Data Centres,” available for free to download from the company’s website.

Just as IT assets, network bandwidth, compute power, and the level of virtualisation are determined as part of the consolidation analysis, it is also critical to have an accurate understanding of each site’s physical infrastructure capabilities. The new document demonstrates through a series of examples, how to establish and compare data centre capacities - information which is a key input for deciding which sites will become the ‘receiving’ data centres.

Being able to compare different data centre’s capacity on a like for like basis is often difficult. It can lead to serious problems including gross over-provisioning of resources or, conversely, not having enough power, cooling, or space capacity to meet user needs. Current capacity, utilisation, and scalability for future growth all need to be understood before deciding which facilities will become the receiving host. Since there can be wide differences in the size, architecture, and management and reporting structures of the data centres involved in any given project, specifying these capabilities may seem to be a daunting task.

White Paper #177 from Schneider Electric describes a simple, cost-effective and standardised approach for establishing current conditions and future capabilities of each data centre. In addition, it provides guidance about the steps that need to be taken to make good judgments about how much can be consolidated and which sites make the most sense for becoming receiving data centres.

The new document makes good use of case studies to illustrate their approach: It quotes an example from the Department of Defence where the Schneider Electric methodology was used to asses five data centres for consolidation, and to identify changes that would result in energy savings, operating expense reduction and increased availability.

To download a free copy of White Paper 177, “Determining the Power, Cooling, and space capacities when consolidating Data Centre’s” by Wendy Torell and Patrick Donovan please visit http://www.apc.com/whitepapers.