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Saint Luke’s Health System is a regional health organization recognized for quality, substantiated by earning the 2010 Missouri Quality Award. At present, it includes 11 hospitals and several clinics throughout Missouri and Kansas.

Keeping a 10,000 sq. ft. network room cool

The health system industry applies more pressure in regard to information availability than other comparable markets. With the pressure of deploying electronic medical records throughout the health system, unavailable information can literally mean the difference between life and death.

Saint Luke’s supports over 2.5 million square feet of hospital structure by deploying network infrastructure points of presence approximately every 10,000 square feet. These network rooms require controlled-quality electrical power and cooling to allow optimum performance. As heat density has significantly increased due primarily to PoE deployment (Power over Ethernet – technology that sends electrical power simultaneously with Ethernet data), these rooms require additional cooling.

Choosing the right partner and system

Saint Luke’s supplier partner, Electronics Supply, connected them with Schneider Electric cooling technology and APC representatives, Rick Johnson and Rob Pfleging. With heat densities significantly increasing in the blade server racks, they realized that adequate conditioned air could not be provided via an under-floor pressurized architecture. This caused them to investigate alternative technologies and chose the APC InRow cooling infrastructure, which met their needs and by far leads the market in innovation.

Partnering with Schneider Electric, Saint Luke’s implemented the APC InRow cooling architecture within a majority of our existing rooms and decided it would be their design standard going forward. They also deploy APC Symmetra UPS units as a standard in the before-mentioned rooms to support availability during electrical power outages.

The technology performs at higher energy efficiency than other older technologies on the market. Additionally, APC InRow units essentially provide cooling directly at the point of heat loads.

Reaching 99.97% uptime

In addition, they utilize InfraStruxure InRow cooling in all new and future distributed network rooms supporting primarily Cisco® routers and switches. They have also implemented the APC cooling technology in their new 10,000-square-foot data center, which provides support to all core servers, network switches, and storage. Also implemented in this data center is a 1MW 2N solution that uses the Symmetra PX UPS with both 208V and 415V distribution.

Their overall application and infrastructure availability goal is 99.97 percent available across the Health System, while our data center energy efficiency goal is 1.22 to 2.10 PUE. The APC by Schneider Electric technologies have helped support both of these goals as the cooling units are variable speed and minimized in regard to single points of failure.”

Learn more about St. Luke’s data center story by accessing the full case study

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