Power & Cooling in the Data Center

Active Power's PowerHouse is the latest critical backup power system in the world and is the most recent example of a truly green data center infrastructure. Active Power's PowerHouse incorporates high system efficiency, interoperability, right-sizing and renewable energy sources at a substantial cost savings compared to that of legacy systems.

Component level efficiency is important, but system level efficiency is critical. Achieving high overall system efficiency is a tough balancing act that few individual users master without some level of engineering support. The other side of the coin is that two high efficiency systems do not necessarily yield overall high system efficiency. Naturally, the weakest link in the chain determines the overall strength and the same is true in the world of power distribution.

Reliability and predictability of any infrastructure protecting a mission critical operation is an area of concern for any user. Any IT manager would likely trade energy efficiency gains for higher reliability if it came down to a choice. The ability to manage and optimize IT loads in smaller and isolated blocks makes up for a significant savings. Right-sizing the infrastructure to the load has the most impact on physical infrastructure electrical consumption.

Renewable energy sources play an important role in containerized system design. Coupled with a containerized data center, organizations help replace the dependence on fossil or nuclear fuels or as a partial substitute and/or peak shaving to reduce grid power consumption and cost per kilowatt hour.

To date, Active Power has deployed more than 10 megawatts of its PowerHouse system worldwide.