Issue 13, Dec/Jan
ssue 13, Dec 10/Jan 11
FOCUS EATON’S DATA CENTER
data centers in Singapore and Amsterdam, and plans to continue using it after the new data centers are online. “We get consistent performance,” he says.
On top of service, Agar wanted data centers that are more environmentally friendly and energy efficient, and having seen the growth Eaton had gone through in the last decade, Agar also wanted something that could cope as the business changes. In the past six years, Eaton has made 30 acquisitions, and in the last two years it has seen revenue grow by US$2.2bn. “I needed to build a model that would scale rapidly, was flexible and agile,” he says.
DESIGNING FOR EFFICIENCY
The process of site selection and property procurement for the Kentucky data centers took two years. After analyzing the likelihood of natural disasters, energy prices and connectivity to AT&T’s network, the selection was narrowed to the corridor between Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky as the first option and Atlanta, Georgia as a second. After evaluating 30 locations in the Kentucky corridor, Eaton purchased two pieces of property in the corridor, and broke ground.
Holder Construction has worked as the general contractor on the project, and EYP Mission Critical Facilities (now HP Mission Critical Facilities) is providing electrical and mechanical engineering services. Corgan is acting as the project’s architect, Hood- Patterson on its commissioning services and Mark G Anderson Consultants are taking care of program-management services.
Altogether, the team spent between four and six months working on the design requirements’ document alone, which rested on the three pillars of business requirements, IT requirements and facilities requirements.
The two Kentucky data centers are being built to a single design for the purpose of efficiency and cost effectiveness. “The original strategy was to design once and build twice,” Agar writes. “The objective has been to operate these facilities with a small team of electrical and mechanical engineers. Having the same design and operational processes enables the team to move easily between the facilities that look, feel and operate exactly the same.”
Each data center will consist of two 10,000 sq
ft data halls. When Phase I is launched, one data hall will be fully developed and the other will only be a shell built for future expansion.
Both data centers have been designed to include completely redundant electrical infrastructure. The first facility will have one 12,470V utility feed, and there are plans in place to add a second one in future. Power delivered through the feed is stepped down to 400V for IT and 480V for the mechanical systems. The facilities will use Eaton-made switchgear, UPS and power-distribution products, supplying 400V to servers, storage and network gear.
Eaton said it expects Kentucky’s climate to allow it to use waterside economization 70% of the year
At launch, the first phase of each data center will have total electrical capacity of 5.4MW, and each data hall will provide a total of 1.8MW of net IT capacity, with 90 watts per sq ft on day one. These loads will increase to 180 watts per sq ft at full build-out.
The cooling set-up in the new data centers consists of a chiller plant with a closed-loop chilled-water system to cool the data halls and an open condenser to remove heat. Water, chilled to 68F, is circulated on the supply side to the Stulz computer room air handler (CRAH) placed near the data halls. Inside the CRAH, water is pushed through a fan-and-coil configuration, supplying cool air under the raised floor.
The cool air is pushed into enclosures on the data center floor made by Wright Line – a company Eaton bought in August 2010 – whose chimneys deliver it to the air plenum situated near the ceiling of the data center. It is then returned to the CRAH where it is recycled. Water, warmed to 82F, is circulated back to the Carrier chiller on the return side, where the excess heat is passed to the condenser loop and transported to the cooling towers to be exhausted.
LOOKING AHEAD
Eaton expects Kentucky’s climate to allow it to use waterside economization for 70% of the year, resulting in projected annual savings of US$56,000 per year. One of the project’s long-term goals is to converge monitoring and
management of IT and facilities in the new data centers. Agar is planning to start with the implementation of a Honeywell building management system (BMS) to monitor and manage mechanical systems at both facilities. Eaton chose Alerton’s BMS, which will collect 600 data points per second.
The team will also implement an Eaton- made electrical power management system (EPMS). Eaton Power Xpert Foreseer Platform will monitor electrical infrastructure across both facilities and provide real-time power usage effectiveness (PUE) data.
The platform will collect information from electrical switchgear, UPS systems, batteries and other critical equipment. It will also receive more than 500 data points per second from the Alerton BMS.
At present, Eaton’s IT systems are monitored and managed by a number of disparate software solutions. Eaton is in the process of developing a roadmap to reduce the number of programs used. Currently it uses HP and IBM computing platforms with Cisco networking. The long-term goal is to be able to manage service delivery through a single interface, also eventually integrating it with the converged BMS and EPMS platforms.
EXTENDING ITIL PROCESSES
Each request for a new server in the data center will be processed by IT and facilities teams, with both going through the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process. Extending the ITIL process to include facilities considerations will be a new practice for Eaton.
Each request will involve a capacity analysis in terms of space, cooling and power. “The new server will be integrated into the monitoring and management platforms prior to going into production,” Uhlman says. Each new server will also be entered into an asset-management database and eventually into a configuration- management database. Of course, Eaton wants to get all of this right. As a data center provider, the industry will be looking to see what Eaton, with its product line and data center knowledge, can achieve.
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