Try Before You Buy: Build your Data Center Design at World Wide Technology’s Advanced Innovation Center

Credit to Author: Ron Catanzaro| Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 17:46:15 +0000

World Wide Technology’s (WWT) Advanced Innovation Center (ATC) is like what testing tracks are to new car development. The ATC brings together a range of data center solutions in one location as a proving ground. Live working data centers can be built and rebuilt quickly and easily to simulate business needs. WWT relies on customized racks, power and cooling from APC by Schneider Electric to create such flexibility.

Customers can experiment in this innovative testing environment with data center configurations and capabilities — scaling up and down and safely failing on purpose. They can see how (and if) a particular data center design would work for them before buying and deploying.

The first iteration of the ATC started in 2009 with six racks. A few years later, it expanded into other spaces on WWT’s campus and grew to 150+ racks. Because of the tremendous growth and a lack of dedicated space, rack configurations as they were wouldn’t work. That’s when WWT turned to us for a customized rack solution.

Taller, wider, deeper 52U cabinets maximize the footprint and provide an additional 10U per rack space. Racks are built locally and come fully integrated, cutting back on build time and packaging. Through in-row cooling and hot-aisle containment, one rack can go from zero or low density when it’s not consuming any power to quickly consuming high density, 20 Kw of power.

Of course, it takes more than customized racks to make a data center flexible and agile enough to go from low-density to high-density in 24 hours. WWT found that flexibility and predictability with cooling solutions from Schneider Electric.

Trying Before Buying Means Savings

Overall, the ATC is helping close the gap between what customers think they need and what their businesses really require. Building a real proof of concept allows for product benchmarking, design validation, functionality testing and upgrades.

The result is that customers can preserve capex and adopt more of a pay-as-you-grow methodology. They can build an infrastructure for today and experiment for tomorrow.

We spoke with Bill Hoelzer, a WWT facilities technical architect and Mike Parham, technical solutions architect, WWT about the ATC. Get more details about the customized rack specs and find out the results from implementing in-row cooling and hot-aisle containment the by reading the full case study.

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