A data center designed and built for NHS Airedale, Bradford, and Leeds, which utilizes Schneider Electric InfraStruxure with InRow OA, over-aisle cooling solution has won a prestigious DatacenterDynamics EMEA Award for “Innovation in the Micro Data Center”. The award was received by John Thompson of Advanced Power Technology (APT) on behalf of the customer during an event hosted by DatacenterDynamics in London.

The DatacenterDynamics Award recognizesan innovative response to challenges of space utilization, power distribution and back-up, cooling, access and security - the hallmarks of small data centers. In this case, Schneider ElectricElite Partner, APT, designed and implemented a high density data centre with a contained hot aisle for the PCT. The use of the over-aisle cooling solution takes up no data centre floor space whatsoever, enabling equipment cabinet space to be maximized.

“The over-aisle cooling means that none of the valuable white space in the data centre is taken up with cooling equipment – providing more physical room for servers,” said Martin Powis, head of IT & Telecoms Infrastructure at NHS Airedale, Bradford, and Leeds. “Since the hot aisle is contained, the data centre can run higher power density and higher server temperatures more predictably. In addition to a better managed and more productive environment, this will also enable lower operating costs as the physical infrastructure is run nearer to optimum efficiency.”

The award winning data center includes eight equipment racks protected by an 80kW APC Symmetra UPS (64kW N+1), with the InRow OA cooling units suspended over the contained hot aisle and providing up to 8kW/ rack cooling capacity. Both the cooling and power protection is scalable and the room can accommodate a further two equipment cabinets if required (cabling and pipe work is pre-installed to enable the space to be utilized at a later date).

In addition to maximizing the space available for compute, APT were also able to meet two important limitations affecting the data center build: Firstly the data center is housed in a listed building (i.e., on the Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest) and therefore the customer wanted to avoid the complications of special planning requirements needed for building alterations.

Secondly, since the building is leased, the PCT wanted to be sure that any data center infrastructure equipment in which it invested would be portable and re-usable should a move to a new location be required at some point in the future. The cooling design is able to ensure sufficient airflow using a hard deck instead, avoiding the cost of a suspended floor as well as the difficulties indicated above.