New Rackspace data center in the UK: photo tour and features of the new DC
From a distance, all this seems small, but the area of the DC is two football fields.
Large telecommunication companies are constantly expanding their capacities, as there are more and more customers, and customer requirements are higher. The well-known company Rackspace is no exception. At the end of last month, this company launched a new data center , which is located in the UK, Crowley (about 50 km from London). The new data center has introduced a lot of interesting technologies that save resources and work more efficiently.
According to company management, this data center is the largest in the country where indirect (indirect) cooling technology is used, with external air intake. Through the use of this and some other technologies, the company was able to achieve PUE = 1.15 with an average PUE for other data centers of 1.7. The new data center is already the tenth for Rackspace, in the UK this company now has two data centers.
This is the entrance to the new DC. A
multi-level security system includes an external perimeter using employee card scanners.
About 80 company employees work here.
This data center also uses Open Compute Project (OCP) technologies. It is worth recalling that the ideologist and founder of this concept is Facebook, and the consortium itself was founded in 2011. Nowadays, the Open Compute Project (OCP) technologies are used by Apple, Intel, Microsoft and many other corporations and companies.
The company uses a customized version of OCP equipment.
There are about 200 km of cables.
The area of the new data center is 12,080 m2, while the power supply of the facility is about 6 MW. At the same time, due to the availability of free space, the data center can be expanded, with an increase in power supply up to 30 MW. In total, more than 50 thousand servers can be placed here. A suburb of London was chosen due to the presence of modern energy infrastructure in the region. In addition, in Crowley, the company managed to acquire land for its data center relatively cheaply (it must be thought that in the suburbs of London the land is not cheap at all).
The new cooling system, as mentioned above, allows significant savings. The average annual temperature of the region is lower than in many other countries, and the indirect air cooling system can be used here without any problems, active cooling using refrigeration equipment is practically not used. At the same time, air-to-air heat exchangers are installed in the system, a solid suspension, dust does not penetrate from the outside. Excool heat exchangers are installed on the roof of the data center.
All cooling systems are installed on the roof.
A positive point is the flow of air from the heat exchangers on the roof to the halls with a slight pressure drop.
Inside a closed loop, air alternately passes through hot and cold corridors, which increases the efficiency of the cooling system. If the air temperature in the region rises above a certain level, an additional system is activated using evaporative cooling. So, if in hot corridors the temperature reaches about 36 ° C, then inside the server racks the temperature is 24 ° C (the average summer temperature in the region is lower than 24 ° C, which is why cooling by outside air is possible).
Sunlight transmitted through fiber optics is used to illuminate halls and utility rooms in the daytime.
Servers and other network equipment operate in accordance with ASHRAE TC9.9
As for water consumption, the use of this resource is also minimal. To reduce the amount of water consumed, the company installed a rainwater collection system (and there are a lot of rains in the region).
The total cost savings resulting from the use of all these systems is from 40 to 55 euros per kilowatt load per month.
If necessary, the DC can accommodate much more equipment than is now installed.
The company's data center a few weeks ago received an excellent rating from BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method). According to Rackspace, this DC is the greenest in the UK.
The security system is also on top here.
Now, dozens of people work in the DC.