Power Distribution Inc. (PDI), a provider of mission critical power distribution equipment for data centers, recently unveiled the i-CON Modular Data Center. This customizable, easy-to-service solution is designed with today’s complex IT infrastructure in mind-delivering powerful, manageable, and highly efficient data center equipment in a modular container. The i-CON helps customers increase their IT capacity, power, efficiency, and return-on-investment – while reducing capital expenditures, and time typically associated with the deployment of traditional, green field data centers. Traditional data centers typically take 12 to 24 months on average to deploy versus 8 to 12 weeks for an i-CON deployment.

“Challenges associated with inter-related virtualization, server, storage, application, and network equipment has spawned demand for a new class of technology-the modular data center,” said Rob Sweaney, president, PDI. “i-CON was specifically designed to help customers ride the wave of this next-generation infrastructure-giving them the power and flexibility they need, while keeping an eye on cost and efficiency savings.”

i-CON is built from a standard ISO shipping container, customized with key attributes of a standard brick-and-mortar data center. This compact design enables equipment to be easily deployed while PDI’s patented Branch Circuit Monitoring Systems (BCMS) and customized monitoring interface allows for remote, real-time power quality monitoring of voltage, current, kW, kVA, power factor, container, and rack measurements including rack capacity, temperature, fan speed, load, and other key performance metrics.

Additional key features of the i-CON system include:

• Modular server racks that are vendor-neutral with a capacity of 48 U per rack. There are 672U of standard 19 in. rack-mounts in a 40 ft container. Multiple i-CON containers can be stacked and placed side-by-side for increased density per square foot.
• Rack-based modular cooling solution enables i-CON to operate with as little as 1 populated rack without efficiency losses.
• The DynaCool On-Demand Cooling System integrated self-contained cooling units (SCU) for maximum efficiency and serviceability.
• Rack-level scalability for optimized IT capacity deployment-one container, or one rack at a time.
• Adjustable, upgradeable keyed extraction racks for ease-of-service.
• PDI’s Proven Powerwave Overhead Bus System: Monitored flexible overhead power distribution to the racks with both redundant and non-redundant power architecture options.
• The i-CON Facility Management System offering remote access for both container and rack-level control.

i-CON’s self-contained and modular design creates a feature that no other vendor can match –service access. Each rack is purposefully positioned for optimum accessibility and can be easily slid into and locked in a maintenance position. PDI’s unique design allows for 15 in. of clearance between the racks and 30 inches of access behind the racks. With i-CON, all IT and facility maintenance can be performed directly from within the system, ensuring minimal impact to the container-wide cooling system or the overall climatized environment within the container.

“One of the challenges our customers face is keeping pace with the increasing complexity associated with the expansion of data centers,” Sweaney added. “By moving the entire data center into a secure, accessible container, i-CON is helping our customers to address these challenges head-on. The i-CON solution enables organizations to expand capacity in a fraction of the time it would take to build out a green field data center and at a substantially lower price point.”

i-CON technology can be customized to meet customer specifications across a wide multitude of IT equipment vendors and configurations, including but not limited to: HP, EMC, Sun/Oracle, Dell, Cisco, IBM, SGI, DataDirect Networks, and LSI.

PDI will demonstrate i-CON at the following trade shows:

• 7x24 Exchange show on November 14-17, 2010 in Phoenix.
• Dallas Datacenter Dynamics show on December 7, 2010.