Photos: Inside Datapod's container data centres

Advanced cooling techniques

Linked gallery: Inside Datapod's container data centres

The APC racks housed within the Datapod were designed to address the increasing requirement for higher density computing - whilst cutting down on cooling requirements and thus power costs.

APC country manager Gordon Makryllos said traditional data centre configurations were built on a raised floor, with cracks in between the racks where hot and cold air mix. Many of these configurations, he said, were only capable of running two to three kilowatts per rack.

The APC solution in the Datapod used in-row cooling to bring the cold air closer to the load, enabling the data centre operator to run at six to eight kilowatts per rack.

Further, the exhausts of the two racks of equipment faced each other in an aisle only just wide enough to service the equipment. This aisle could be closed off to the rest of the room using two sliding doors.

This 'hot aisle containment' allowed data centre operators to run at up to 30 kilowatts per rack, Makryllos said.

"The smaller the area you are trying to cool, the more energy efficient it is," he said. "We can go into most data centres and offer 50 percent savings in energy."

Makyrllos said there were twenty data centres in Canberra alone using this cooling system.

"What we're finding is, a lot of customers want to deploy this, but their building can't take it," he said. "They don't have the room, the power, the cooling, the chilled water, or can't get approvals from landlords or the council.

"So what we're saying to them is, rather than take two years to build a data centre, buy a Datapod and put it out somewhere in a warehouse or anywhere that you have cheap real estate.

"All you need is fibre, power and water, and you have a data centre on demand. If a customer is constrained by their building, they now have another option."