$8 Million Container Order for Active Power

powerhouse1

A row of PowerHouse containers from Active Power, which house flywheeel UPS systems and generators.

Active Power (ACPW) has received an $8 million order for its PowerHouse container solution, the company said this week. The order from one of the Active Power's IT partners was largest single order in the company's history.

The PowerHouse packages a flywheel UPS, switchgear, a diesel generator and fuel tanks in a shipping container, and is designed to provide portable power infrastructure to support a data center container packed with servers.

Companies running short of computing capacity are considering data center containers as a to expand their IT operations until they can build or lease new data centers. The credit crunch has intensified the focus on short-term capacity solutions.

"Active Power is in the right place at the right time as the datacenter containerization trend sweeps across the industry and becomes more generally accepted," said Martin Olsen, vice president, Global Channels and Business Development for Active Power. "Lower construction and acquisition costs along with reduced time to deployment and lower operating costs, makes for a compelling argument to a customer who needs to rapidly expand capacity.

"This core set of customer demands is increasing adoption of the containerized datacenter as well as the containerized power and cooling systems needed to support this mission critical infrastructure," Olsen added.

Active Power specializes in flyhweel power technology. A flywheel is a spinning cylinder that generates power from kinetic energy, continuing to spin when grid power is interrupted. See our video demonstration of how a flywheel works).