APC Delivers on IBM Data Center Container Promise

Making good on an IBM promise to create an open architecture when it comes to data center containers, APC by Schneider Electric announced today that it has delivered a data center container that combines IBM’s container technology with APC’s InfraStruxure rack, power and cooling equipment.

Late last year, IBM promised to deliver an open data center container platform that drew support from APC, Eaton, Emerson Network Power and others.

According to Kevin Brown, vice president of APC’s Data Center Global Offer, it’s still unclear what level of adoption the industry will see of data center containers. For example, it’s clear that large-scale IT organizations running cloud computing services can benefit froming deploy data centers in containers. And the data center container strategy is obviously applicable to any scenario such as emergency services where portability of the data is a necessity.

But as for mainstream adoption with corporate environments, Brown says the jury is still out because of the commitment to a specific architecture that a data center requires and the amount of equipment required to make the data center platform cost-effective.

But for IT organizations that need to deploy server horsepower quickly, data center containers can cut the deployment time usually associated with rolling out a new data center by months.

The IBM data center containers comes in modules that range from 500 to 2,500 square feet depending on the server capacity required.