High energy costs and a soaring demand for computing power, combined with tight budgets and new technologies – at the moment, data centre operators and CIOs have to put up with difficult conditions. Thus they are forced to exploit every possible potential for efficiency and streamlining, and systematically reduce staffing, start-up and operating costs. This is the only way that growth and competitiveness can only be ensured. At CeBIT 2011, Rittal was presenting new products that allow concrete savings and that continue to improve the security, high availability and energy efficiency of IT environments and infrastructures. They include "Rittal – The System", a superbly coordinated system platform. It combines new IT infrastructure components, standardisation options and solutions for automating data centre operation.

Highlights at the stand

Customers' data centre requirements are very different, for example in relation to availability and security. In response, Rittal is presenting data centres in four different dimensions at Hanover:

The classic live data centre room-in-room concept with separate technical and IT security rooms to house any type and number of server racks and network enclosures. It is equipped with a raised floor, active and passive fire protection, as well as with CRAC and HighDensity cooling. The high-capacity  container is a modular container concept with separate units for climate and energy, as well as an IT-container for housing the server, storage and network units. The autonomous outdoor data centre with its own cogeneration of heat and power (CHP) unit also represents a transportable data centre, though one that is independent of external power supplies. The associated power plant ensures both the energy supply and the cold water feed via an adsorption unit. The redundant, compact automated data centre has been constructed in cooperation with Rittal's partner company Bechtle. It is a complete, fully redundant data centre including infrastructure and high-performance servers and is housed in just two Rittal Basic Safes. Thanks to its high output density, the compact data centre is also a suitable platform for private cloud computing.

Christoph Caselitz, Chief of Customer Operations at Rittal: "At CeBIT, we are showing just how customers can significantly cut time and costs through consistently using standardised products and coordinated solutions in an automatable data centre system based on these different data centre concepts."

Subject areas for energy and climate control

In addition to walk-in data centre concepts, Rittal is also presenting new products in the "IT Cooling starts here!" and "Power Area" sections. "Power Area" deals with the question of: "What happens if the power fails?" The customer can obtain comprehensive information on such solutions as stand-by diesel generators, fuel cells, automatic system selector switches, and UPS systems, including the monitoring and control of all the components. In the second subject area, Rittal is exhibiting a range of innovations for the climate control of IT components, including circulatory air climate control systems or high density cooling concepts for supercomputers. [www.rittal.de]