APC SmartBunker – An entire data centre in a rack!

IT deployments for small businesses or branch offices are typically relegated to small confined rooms, closets, or even on the office floor, these spaces are typically unorganised, unsecure, hot, unmonitored and space constrained. A common explanation for this, whether from a small business owner or branch office manager, is that “we only had a few pieces of IT equipment so we just put them in here”.

This reasoning is often justified when there is little criticality to the larger business if that IT equipment goes down. However, as businesses grow, their reliance and dependence on IT increases which makes them much more sensitive to IT downtime.

The APC SmartBunker addresses all of these and other issues. SmartBunker is a Micro Data Centre providing a self contained, secure computing environment for the storage, processing, telephony and networking equipment necessary to run the customer applications.

Each unit is preconfigured and factory tested, they ship in one enclosure and include a UPS, batteries, power distribution (PDU), security, DCIM (Struxureware Expert) and option for active cooling, fire protection, and fire suppression. and can range in size from 1 – 100kW in IT load.

The benefits of distributing Micro Data Centres are that they scale as needed, reduce computing latency, and reduce the risk of bringing down the entire data centre operation (i.e. reduce single points of failure).

SmartBunkers are ideal solutions for edge environments and feature different enclosure designs to address concerns such as sound-proofing and aesthetic panels for office spaces or thermal isolation and dust protect in industrial environments.

Some trends that have made micro data centres feasible include:

• Compaction – Virtualized IT equipment in cloud architectures that used to require 10 IT racks, can now fit into one.

• IT convergence and integration – Servers, storage, networking equipment, and software is being integrated together in factories for more of an “out of the box” experience.

• Reduced latency – there is a strong desire, business need, or even life-critical need to reduce latency between centralised data centres (e.g. cloud) and applications.

• Speed to deployment – to either gain a competitive advantage or secure business.
• Cost – in many cases, micro data centres can utilize “sunk costs” in facility power (e.g. switchgear) and cooling (e.g. chillers) to be less capital intensive than building a new data centre.

As with many businesses, especially small businesses, it takes a downtime event or a series of close calls to finally invest in improving the availability of IT operations. It is also clear that these situations often result in avoidable downtime and inconvenience. IT managers in these environments have little time to research physical infrastructure best practices so SmartBunker takes care of all of those issues for you.

If this problem sounds familiar and you would like to find out more about how a SmartBunker could help reduce the risk of downtime and physical threats to your IT load contact us today. Call: 01252 692559 or email info@sourceups.co.uk.