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APC Expands InRow® Cooling Product Family with InRow OA and Refrigerant Distribution Unit

Posted on Monday, August 16, 2010

Energy Efficient, Overhead Cooling Solution for Medium to Large DataCenter Environments

West Kingston, RI, August 16, 2010 — APC by Schneider Electric, a global leader in integrated critical power and cooling services, today announced the InRow^® OA and Refrigerant Distribution Unit (RDU) pumped refrigerant cooling system. The APC InRow OA expands APC’s leading InRow product line by providing an overhead, energy efficient, refrigerant based cooling solution for data center environments.

“Data center densities continue to increase and efficiency concerns encourage customers to maximize all the available space for physical infrastructure,” said Dave Guidette, senior vice president, Enterprise Systems, Services & Software, APC. “The new APC InRow OA and RDU provide data center managers with increased flexibility by eliminating the need to remove or break-up racks to implement a row-based cooling architecture to meet the needs of higher density loads.”

Ideal for medium and high density applications, the new APC InRow OA captures up to 27kW of hot IT exhaust air at the source, neutralizes it and discharges cool, ambient air to the IT space. The OA includes integrated thermal containment, which eliminates mixing of hot and cold air streams – improving cooling predictability. Modular construction, variable speed fans, and active response controls are all integrated into one high efficiency system. The over head design requires zero whitespace, because it can be mounted on a rack or suspended from the ceiling above the hot aisle, improving flexibility and the ability to adapt to existing data center environments.

This refrigerant based system has been developed to eliminate the threat from water leaks in close proximity to IT equipment. The refrigerant used in this modular, pumped system is R134a, a non-toxic solution that poses no threat to IT equipment in the event of a leak, and has no Ozone depletion potential.

The RDU is a refrigerant distribution unit capable of providing 160kW of heat rejection to the APC InRow OA cooling units, and its modular construction, variable speed pumps, and active response controls are integrated into the highly efficient variable volume pumping system. The RDU has the ability to modulate capacity from 0-100 percent with no minimum loading requirements and may be placed in the IT environment or in an adjacent location to further increase whitespace utilization for IT equipment.

Other key components to this system include modular piping headers and the mounting structure of the APC InRow OA. The piping headers are an integrated part of the mounting structure of the APC InRow OA to simplify installation and reduce initial investment costs.

Key benefits of new APC InRow OA include:

· Ability to maximize available floor space for IT equipment

· Address concerns of water in the data center

· 30-50% more efficient than traditional raised floor data center cooling

· Elimination of hot spots caused by high density deployments

· Flexibility to easily deploy and redeploy cooling

· Simple to install minimizing initial investment