Schneider Electric is building Baidu’s first modular data center

Energy management vendor Schneider Electric is to build two eco-friendly M1 containerized data centers for Chinese web service giant Baidu. As the world’s biggest Chinese search engine and website provider, Baidu invited tenders for a fast build, low input high capacity system, which Schneider said it won on the strength of its standard, modular pre-fabricated systems. Baidu’s specifications called for an M1 data center with energy saving, performance enhancing systems, such as In-Row air conditioning and integrated data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software.

Baidu, the largest Chinese website and most-used search engine in China (where Google has long since pulled out rather than meet the content requirements laid down by the Chinese government) has selected Schneider Electric to build their first containerized data center modules. Schneider has previously worked with Baidu to provide custom IT cabinets as part of Baidu’s Open Source-based Project Scorpio. Schneider has a large selection of standardized datacenter container modules built around both their hardware expertise in UPS and power supply experience and their DCIM software solution StruxureWare. They have been offering customers both partially prefabricated and fully pre-fabricated datacenter modules, ranging from simple containers prewired to meet the customer needs to complete IT datacenter solutions incorporating their latest hardware and software solutions. For Baidu, the two data center modules contracted for are being built to meet the specific requirements that Baidu set forth in their request for proposals.