In this interview, Schneider Electric’s director of data center alliances Robert Bunger talks over the company’s decision to upgrade its membership to the Open Compute Foundation to platinum, further pledging its support for the open source model. 

The company has produced a white paper, a trade-off tool and a reference design, looking at how companies could transition from a ”traditional data center to an OpenCompute architecture” and the potential savings that can be made with Open Compute electrical infrastructure. 

“The architecture shows that you can have mutualized power supplies within the rack, you have the option of putting the UPS function inside the rack and how does that change the cost. There is a cost saving, but it all depends on how you’re architected, it could be anywhere from as small as a single digit percentage to as high as 25 percent, depending on what your starting point is.”