WEST KINGSTON, R.I. — American Power Conversion (APC) has announced the acquisition of selected assets from privately held tecnikon Limited, a subsidiary of i-Age Projects Limited, a U.K.-based developer of self-contained rack enclosures designed to cool high-density equipment in data centers. According to APC, the acquisition of tecnikon highlights its continued investment in cooling solutions to reduce downtime associated with complex cooling challenges stemming from increasingly high temperatures in densely populated data center racks.

"APC is at the forefront of developing leading edge technology for the network-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI) that supports data centers," said Rodger B. Dowdell Jr., president and CEO. "More powerful microprocessors combined with smaller product footprints is making effectively cooling high-density equipment one of the most complicated infrastructure challenges facing data center managers today. With the addition of the technology under development by tecnikon, APC will be setting the standard in the industry by cooling up to 15 kW per rack in a rack-based form factor that helps solve this problem while working to reduce total cost of ownership."

tecnikon is developing self-contained rack enclosures designed to ensure suitable environmental conditions for high power density applications. The modular approach is said to enable the data center manager to deliver high amounts of cooling to select densely populated racks versus cooling the entire room to the highest requirement. This efficient design helps lower the total cost of operation in the data center, says the company.

"In the more than a decade or so that we have been designing and building data centers, the challenge of preventing growing heat densities from diminishing equipment performance has grown much more complex and urgent," explained Peter Hannaford, managing director of i-Age Projects Limited. "We designed the self-enclosed cabinets to not only address the potentially significant performance issues of cooling racks housing large, and growing, amounts of processing power but also to meet the requirements for a modular, scalable solution which could grow in line with business demand, thus avoiding large upfront capital expense. We are delighted to join APC and its industry leading efforts to bring innovative rack-based cooling products to market."

For more information, visit www.apc.com.

Publication date: 06/09/2003