The design and construction of a high density, Green, state of the art, data center to support 99.999% availability at the enterprise level

The project started in February 2010 with the new datacenter commissioning in September. The RFP and approval for the contact was completed in April moving the project to the design phase. The design phase was completed in 30 days. Technology Services reviewed infrastructure designs that focused on high availability and efficiency while determining the best ROI for the investment. Construction was completed by Aug 2010 with the final commissioning of the facility in September 2010.

Project Inspiration
The new datacenter project was part of our Unified Infrastructure initiative to deliver high availability services to the college system. The datacenter is a co-location datacenter that mirrors our existing primary datacenter. Our highly virtualized (95%) environment allows us to move services within this private cloud infrastructure. This project accentuates our Green-IT initiatives by making the facility the most efficient, high density datacenter in the region.

How it Works
The new facility also has a unique sizing capability. The high density design provides power and cooling capabilities of 17KW per rack. While the rack infrastructure must be set, the core power and cooling doesn’t need to be active. This flexible design has modular battery backup capacity with a maximum capacity of 480KW. The modular UPS design with 99.7% efficient UPS’s provide a significant reduction in wasted power while still providing our future capacity needs. The room utilizes sealed air liquid cooled racks to reducing cooling costs. In rack (Green Gas) fire suppression protects the equipment while reducing the impact of a fire system discharge in the entire room. Environmental and performance variables are monitored and controlled.

What Sets it Apart
In addition to an aggressive timeline and significantly low construction costs,here are two key items that cannot be overlooked:
High Density Design – the room has the power and cooling capacity of 480KW packed into 950 square feet. The room can support 32 server racks with a max power load of 17KW per rack.
High Efficiency – The power distribution provides high voltage to the rack reducing line noise and loss. The in-line liquid cooling provides, contained efficient cooling of the hardware.

Key Benefits
LSCS operates two main data centers with the same hardware in each location as part of our enterprise 5-nines design. The new datacenter’s high efficiency design has a Power Utilization Efficiency (PUE) of 1.37 whereas our existing traditional datacenter operates with a PUE of 3.1. This new datacenter is 226% more efficient than our existing facility. The datacenter’s power and cooling distribution using closed loop cooling with rack level cooling management is the main contributor to this.
The new facility’s unique sizing capability provides flexibility and efficiency. The high density design provided power and cooling capabilities of 17KW per rack. While the rack infrastructure must be set the core power and cooling doesn’t need to be active. The modular UPS design with 99.7% efficient UPS’s provide a significant reduction in wasted power while still providing our future capacity needs.