Schneider Electric Symmetra PX 40 kW

Maximizing Data Center Space with the Symmetra PX 100 kW Dual-Rack Design

When outfitting small to medium data centers or high-density zones within larger facilities, floor space is one of your most valuable assets. The Schneider Electric Symmetra PX 100 kW system is engineered to protect your critical IT workloads while maximizing revenue-generating floor space. This world-class uninterruptible power supply (UPS) delivers up to 100 kW of power protection and battery runtime entirely within the compact footprint of just two standard NetShelter SX racks.

By requiring a mere 14 square feet of physical space, this dual-rack architecture allows facility managers to reclaim valuable data center real estate for server and networking equipment. Measuring 79.1 inches high, 47.2 inches wide, and 42.1 inches deep, its aesthetic design seamlessly integrates onto the data center floor or in a back room. Furthermore, the dual-rack enclosure provides agility for facility wiring, featuring a dual-mains input that allows for either top or bottom feed connections to two separate power inputs, enhancing overall availability and deployment flexibility.

How the Symmetra PX Family Lowers Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

For IT buyers and facility managers, the true cost of a UPS extends far beyond the initial purchase price. The Symmetra PX line—whether in 20 kW, 40 kW, or 100 kW configurations—is purposefully designed to drastically reduce operational expenses, cooling costs, and stranded capital through several core technical advantages:

• Unity Power Factor Corrected (kW = kVA): Unlike legacy UPS systems that force you to calculate the difference between apparent and real power, the Symmetra PX systems feature fully rated inverters. Because output power entirely equals input power, you get exactly what you pay for, improving your return on investment by delivering more real power to your IT load.
• Industry-Leading Efficiency Curve: These high-efficiency power modules operate at up to 95 percent efficiency. More importantly, the efficiency curve is nearly flat down to a 25 percent load. This means the system does not waste energy even when running well below its maximum capacity, resulting in significant savings on ongoing electrical usage and the cooling costs required to mitigate heat waste.
• Pay-As-You-Grow Scalability: Traditional data center design often requires over-provisioning power on day one to account for future growth, leading to stranded capital. The Symmetra PX modular architecture allows you to scale both power and runtime precisely as your demand grows. You can seamlessly add 10 kW power modules one at a time, ensuring you only pay for the capacity your facility actually needs today.
• Reduced Mean Time To Repair (MTTR): Maintenance costs are lowered through the use of self-diagnosing, swappable battery and power modules. Because these hot-swappable components can be replaced in less than 10 minutes without requiring specialized tools, labor costs and the risk of costly downtime due to human error are heavily minimized.

Understanding N+1 Redundancy for Mission-Critical Reliability

To ensure continuous operations, the Symmetra PX series is built around a fault-tolerant N+1 redundant architecture. In an N+1 design, “N” represents the exact number of modules required to support your current IT load, while “+1” provides an additional, fully active backup module. If any single active module fails or is removed for routine maintenance, the +1 module immediately assumes the load without any interruption to your critical infrastructure.

This N+1 redundancy is applied across all critical failure points within the Symmetra PX systems:

• Power Module Redundancy: You can configure the system so that there is an extra 10 kW power module beyond what the load draws. For example, the 100 kW model can scale for redundancy up to 90 kW N+1, the 40 kW model scales up to 40 kW N+1, and the 20 kW model supports up to 20 kW N+1.
• Intelligence Module Backup: The systems feature both a swappable main intelligence module and a redundant intelligence module, guaranteeing maximum possible availability by ensuring the brains of the UPS are continuously backed up.
• Parallel Battery Strings: Redundancy extends directly to the modular batteries. One row of modules makes a string, and all battery modules support the load in parallel. This means no individual battery acts as a single point of failure.

By deploying this N+1 architecture, buyers ensure that hardware failures or routine service swaps never compromise the availability of their mission-critical operations.

Extend Your Data Center Uptime: Symmetra PX 100 kW Battery Runtime Options

To increase the number of minutes your mission-critical IT workloads can remain online during a power outage, the Symmetra PX 100 kW allows facility managers to highly customize their battery backup capacity. Buyers can securely connect up to four optional battery extended runtime frames to a single Symmetra PX 100 UPS to achieve their exact runtime requirements.

Designed to lower your maintenance costs and eliminate data center clutter, these modular batteries are completely housed within a standard IT rack form factor with no messy-looking external cables. When it is time to expand capacity or replace an aging battery, the process is seamless and fast. You simply slide the battery module into place; all DC connections are preconfigured and insulated, meaning there is no dangerous contact with DC terminals and no specialized tool required, thanks to patented rear connectors. Furthermore, these batteries are engineered for extreme availability by connecting in parallel strings. One row of modules creates a single string, and all modules support your load simultaneously, ensuring that no individual battery acts as a single point of failure.

Comparing Power Distribution: Symmetra PX 20 kW vs. 40 kW PDUs

While both the 20 kW and 40 kW Symmetra PX systems feature factory-assembled, configured-to-order power distribution to slash deployment times, their Power Distribution Units (PDUs) differ significantly in physical footprint and electrical input capabilities to serve different facility environments.

The Symmetra PX 20 kW “All-in-One” PDU: Engineered specifically for highly space-constrained small data centers, this system integrates a 39-pole configurable PDU directly inside the single-rack footprint of the UPS itself. This means your power protection, battery backup, maintenance bypass, and power distribution are all housed in one continuous enclosure.

The Symmetra PX 40 kW Panelboard PDU: Designed to offer broader electrical flexibility, the 40 kW system utilizes a dedicated 40 kVA InfraStruxure PDU. This panelboard PDU is housed in its own separate rack alongside the UPS and integrates both distribution and maintenance bypass. While the 20 kW system natively operates on standard 208 V power, the 40 kVA PDU features high-efficiency, NEMA-rated TP-1 isolation transformers that allow it to safely accept 600 V, 480 V, or 208 V inputs while delivering a clean 208 V output to your IT equipment.

Despite these structural differences, both PDU architectures provide world-class agility by shipping with preinstalled Square D bolt-on breakers and customized cord and connector sets (such as L5-20, L21-30, and IEC 309) perfectly matched to your site’s layout, minimizing hazardous cable clutter on the data center floor.

Secure Remote Visibility: Exploring EcoStruxure IT Remote Monitoring Services

Running a modern data center without secure remote monitoring exposes your business to unexpected downtime and evolving cyber threats. Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT is a comprehensive Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution that ensures continuous business continuity by enabling secure monitoring, management, insights, and planning from the edge to the cloud.

The foundation of the EcoStruxure ecosystem is the embedded Network Management Card (NMC), which connects your physical power devices to the network using industry-first IEC 62443-4-2 (SL2) cybersecurity certified firmware, ensuring proactive defense against unauthorized access. From this secure foundation, buyers can select the software and service tier that best fits their operational strategy:

EcoStruxure IT Expert: If your IT team prefers a hands-on approach, this cloud-based software synthesizes performance and alert data into proactive recommendations, granting you complete visibility and control over your infrastructure from any device, wherever you go.

EcoStruxure Data Center Expert: For highly secure environments requiring localized management, this scalable, on-premise software collects, organizes, and distributes critical device information to provide a comprehensive view of your entire multi-vendor physical infrastructure.

EcoStruxure Asset Advisor: If you want ultimate peace of mind and prefer a hands-off approach, this digital service provides 24/7 remote monitoring and troubleshooting managed directly by the experts at the Schneider Electric Connected Services Hub.

EcoStruxure IT Advisor: Tailored for Data Center Managers in large enterprises or colocation facilities, this advanced planning and modeling software transforms raw data into performance insights, empowering you to optimize your physical infrastructure for improved profitability, sustainability, and resiliency.