Exclusive: Elevate launches eco PDU Repower programme
The United Kingdom's surge in data centre investments means Mayflex's Elevate is developing innovative ways to meet demand.
Elevate has recently launched its PDU RePower programme, incentivising customers to trade in their old legacy PDUs for a credit towards newer, more efficient models it offers. Andrew Percival, Managing Director of Mayflex, says the programme has financial benefits for the customer, as well as an overall positive environmental impact.
"Sometimes these units are just taken out of commission, put in a room and just left while the new units come in, and life carries on. With this recharge program we're offering a buyback type scheme where we say, 'if you have some older products not suitable to the power load you need, or it doesn't have the right software...We'll buy those back from you as part of an investment you make in the new product.'"
The need for more powerful PDUs is also growing in the country. Last week, the UK government announced that it had secured £150 billion from US tech firms, which pledged to create thousands of jobs within the country through the "Tech Prosperity Deal."
The Elevate brand was launched this year as a branch of Excel Networking Solutions, meeting demand for higher-specification cabling solutions suitable for data centres, high-power compute environments, and large server rooms. The brand has partnerships with Sunbird, a global DCIM software company, to provide a platform that tracks the utilisation and efficiency of copper, fibre, and power connectors. This is paired with a collaboration with nVent to bring precision liquid cooling and power management to the product offering menu.
"The non-AI data centre market continues to grow and be invested in, whether that's for data sovereignty or data capacity. So we saw a market opportunity that we wanted to try to be involved in. We felt that the existing brands that we own and develop were not suitable for that market," says Percival. "We felt we needed to, rather than tweak something that already existed, develop something from the ground up."
Percival notes that customers may opt to upgrade PDUs due to a growing need for increased server power density, with the added responsibility to address ESG responsibilities within their facilities. The sector is evolving rapidly, with AI capabilities also advancing. This included the ongoing evolution of rack power demands.
"I think that with both cooling and power, to an extent, the evolution of the type of solution that's needed is moving so quickly that we've moved from, two years ago, that having some pretty basic fan units in a server rack was more than sufficient for four kilowatt of power in a rack, and now we have Nvidia pushing 120 kilowatt plus, maybe 200 plus by the end of next year," says Percival. "This needs liquid cooling, direct to chip cooling, so the whole design of the building has to be rethought."
As part of the programme, Elevate will clean and repurpose traded PDUs for resale to the secondary market. This way, as power infrastructure rapidly accelerates and evolves, other uses for older hardware may not keep pace with industry norms, but could still have an impact elsewhere.
Once Elevate receives a unit, it will be inspected, the label removed, and reset to its original factory settings, with any remaining configurations and data removed in accordance with applicable privacy laws. Percival says that while some traded units will be repurposed for companies with lower power needs, others could be donated to charities or developing countries to prevent them from ending up in landfills.
PDU RePower Trade-In is running until December 31st.