Roundup: APC, Emerson, Cyberlink, RightScale

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

APC expands InRow Cooling. APC by Schneider Electric announced the InRow OA and Refrigerant Distribution Unit (RDU) pumped refrigerant cooling system. Meant for medium and high density applications in the data center the APC InRow OA provides an overhead, energy efficient, refrigerant based cooling solution that captures up to 27 kilowatts of hot exhaust air at the source, neutralizes it and discharges cool, ambient air to the IT space.  "The new APC InRow OA and RDU provide data center managers with increased flexibility by eliminating the need to remove or break-up racks to implement a row-based cooling architecture to meet the needs of higher density loads," said Dave Guidette, senior vice president, Enterprise Systems, Services and Software at APC. The new APC InRow OA and Refrigerant Distribution Unit are currently available worldwide.

Emerson introduces new AC-DC power supply. Emerson Network Power (EMR) introduced the DS460S-3 bulk front end AC-DC power supply, which the company describes as a breakthrough in efficiency and density for applications that use distributed power architectures, such as computing, storage, networking, datacom and test and measurement systems. The 1U DS460S-3 can achieve a high typical conversion efficiency of 92 percent at 50 percent full load, which meets the Climate Savers Computing Gold standard.  The units are digitally programmable and DSP controlled.  The DS460S is available for $189 per unit in production quantities.

Cyberlink unveils Virtual Desktop. Managed hosting provider CyberlinkASP announced that it will begin offering fully managed virtual desktops utilizing Citrix XenDesktop technologies on the SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service platform. "Desktop virtualization and Citrix XenDesktop is being adopted by enterprises worldwide in order to transform the traditional form of desktop computing" said Sumit Dhawan, vice president of product marketing, XenDesktop product group at Citrix. "Businesses such as CyberlinkASP along with their collaboration with SoftLayer bring the power of desktop virtualization to enterprises who may not have the expertise to build their own virtual desktop infrastructure." CyberlinkASP provides virtual desktops and back office applications for numerous small to medium sized businesses from its Dallas InfoMart datacenter.  The provisioning and cutover times for CyberlinkASP have now been reduced from weeks to a few hours with the partnership with SoftLayer.  CyberlinkASP and SoftLayer will also be linked via redundant 10 gigabit fiber, using SoftLayer's network-within-a-network topology. SoftLayer and The Planet recently outlined merger plans.

RightScale announces Windows support for management platform. RightScale announced that the RightScale Cloud Management Platform now supports Microsoft Windows-based applications running in the cloud. “Windows applications, which are often developed with custom stacks, can present unique challenges when deployed in the cloud. With our latest release, Windows users can now leverage RightScale’s hallmark cloud automation and portability, address common Windows cloud issues, and manage user access and costs," said RightScale CTO Thorsten von Eicken.  With the latest release of the management platform the processes for Windows server deployment, automation, management and portability can be orchestrated. RightScale has pre-configured numerous Server Templates and RightImages so users can get started in minutes instead of days or weeks. Thorsten von Eicken explains in a blog post Tuesday the arduous process of setting up these features and server templates for general availability.