Cannon Technologies Africa is offering a new range of innovative ISO container-sized modular data centres that provide clients with full UPS facilities – as well as hot and cold aisle functionality – in a choice of 6m, 12m and 13,5m sizes.
According to Mark Awdas, engineering manager with Cannon Technologies, the new ISO standard container options offer clients a wide range of advantages – including free cooling, low PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) ratios and medium/high density facilities.
Key features of the new ISO container units include 95% power efficiency (98% in ECO mode), plus low power LED lighting on a single and highly resilient circuit – replacing the power-hungry twin circuit systems seen on legacy installations.
The unique raised floor system, says Awdas, supports features not normally available in previous containerised offerings, such as enabling cooling water pipe work – and other services – to operate below floor level.
“In responding to client requests for these new units, our engineering team have developed an ISO standard container that gives clients “room to breathe” in a plug-and-play data centre environment – and with drop shipping times as low as seven days,” he explained.
“The team has also developed a modular infrastructure that gives clients a range of unique configuration options that are available, quite literally, off the shelf. Our aim when developing the new range was to create the Holy Grail of modular data centres – namely high levels of flexibility for client installations, but without shoe-horning clients into a one-size-fits-all system,” he says.
Awdas went on to say that the development of the ISO container range offers customers a range of size and format choices – including a clamshell option, which features two, or even three open sides that bolt together – meaning that businesses really can have the best of both worlds. And at a highly cost-competitive price, he notes.
Cannon is especially proud of its clamshell option with the new ISO container series, as the units feature an outer and an inner skin design that – once sited – offers a larger data centre floor area, but without the lead times that legacy modular systems traditionally require.
This innovative approach with the new units, says Awdas, has extended to the design of the lighting system – with a robust and hot-swappable low-power LED lighting circuit that replaces the twin-circuit systems seen in legacy modular data centres.
“Despite the ISO containers being modular in nature, flexibility was the name of the game when our design team sat down to develop these units from scratch. We started by throwing away the book on conventional data centre limitations and developing an ISO container series that offers all the advantages of small and mid-sized data centres – but on a drop-ship and power-efficient basis,” he said.
Cannon’s engineering manager says that most competing modular data centre options represent something of a compromise.
“With the Cannon ISO range clients get a wide choice of options – available on a mix-and-match basis – ranging from ISO standard to WISO and all the way to dual or triple ISO clamshell sizing in the TMDC range,” he says.
“There is also an ISO stack family of multiple 2.4 x 12m modules in our MDC range that can be transported in a standard ISO format – using a crane if stacking is required, in order to create a data centre campus,” he adds.