At DCD>Zettastructure in London last month, Schneider Electric rolled out its HyperPod system, a preconfigured rack enclosure with integrated power, cooling, cabling, software management and thermal containment as a solution to containment for energy efficiency in the data center.

Speaking about how the company came to design the product, Kevin Brown, the CTO for Schneider Electric’s IT division, said: “I would walk around data centers five years ago knowing that containment has a significant impact on the energy efficiency of a data center if done properly, yet I would walk around data centers and see that people had not deployed it.

 “We started asking ourselves why.”

 And what they found, he said, is that despite improving energy efficiency in the data center, moving to a containment model was too disruptive, as well as time consuming, for operators. How to be the least disruptive to the daily operations of a data center as possible is what drove the development of the HyperPod.

“There’s a frame now which works with raised floors, non-raised floors, hot aisle, cold aisle containment, all sorts of different power distribution and cooling strategies, but it really simplifies the installation of all that equipment.”