WEST KINGSTON, R.I., Oct. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- American Power Conversion (Nasdaq: APCC) (APC), a global leader in power availability solutions, today announced that Southern Ohio Medical Center (SOMC) of Portsmouth, Ohio recently deployed APC's InfraStruXure(R) architecture with hot-aisle containment to monitor and maintain the facility's critical data center. APC's InfraStruXure architecture with hot-aisle containment utilizes In-Row(TM) air conditioning to deliver predictable cooling for medium to high density applications.

SOMC, a 232-bed regional medical center with multiple satellite clinics and urgent care centers, employs more than 2,100 full and part time personnel and 140 physicians and specialists. To support this significant operation, SOMC relies upon a powerful data center to store images and result data that is vital to patient care. To ensure that this data center operates at its most efficient levels, with zero downtime, SOMC implemented InfraStruXure architecture that fully integrates power, cooling, racks, and remote data center monitoring. With InfraStruXure's components, SOMC consolidated all its data center equipment in one location, saving itself time and increasing reliability and efficiency, resulting in cost savings and value addition.

"Being a regional medical center, uptime is vital for the functioning of medical imaging services, as they are critical for emergency and surgical processes," said Howard Stewart, RIS/PACS administrator for SOMC. "Therefore, our data center has to operate on demand and without fail 100 percent of the time. APC's InfraStruXure architecture was the logical choice since we could not find a comparable solution that offered a fully integrated system with power, cooling, racks, and remote monitoring. These capabilities save deployment time and increase reliability and efficiency, resulting in saving and value additions. We believe we will see improved reliability and service life of our existing systems, and the scalability offered by this architecture fits in perfectly with our growth plans."

Offering general medical, emergency, surgical, cardiac and OB-GYN services to the population of Southern Ohio and Eastern Kentucky, SOMC has more than doubled its data center power and cooling requirements over the past decade. Monitoring and maintaining a host of cooling and battery backup units quickly became an inefficient and costly practice for the facility, forcing it to consider a new data center solution with reliable, redundant power and cooling capabilities. After evaluating available systems, the facility chose APC's InfraStruXure architecture for its fully-integrated features, including a hot-aisle containment solution with In-Row(TM) air conditioning. A modular system that can be custom designed, InfraStruXure enabled SOMC to install only what it required for the present, yet easily scale to meet future demands. In addition, APC Global Services provided SOMC with valuable turn-key services during all of the planning and installation phases of the project.

With InfraStruXure in place at SOMC, data center servers and configurations, storage solutions, as well as applications such as an integrated picture archive and communications system, radiology information system and speech recognition dictation system are all protected from power failures and damage caused by overheating.

"Organizations that depend upon absolutely reliable data center access need to be aware of the many ways sensitive electronic and networking equipment can fail if not managed properly," said Peter Poulin, APC's vice president, North America. "In the case of SOMC, long unscheduled downtime of a data center could potentially affect patient care. By utilizing InfraStruXure architecture, SOMC's data center operations can expect to realize increased availability, improved adaptability, and speed of deployment, as well as lower total cost of ownership."