SolidNode

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• SoftLayer continues data center expansion. SoftLayer Technologies announced the opening of three new data center pods in the Dallas, Seattle and northern Virginia data centers.  The new pods add capacity for 20,000 additional servers, bringing total capacity to more than 45,000 servers. “These three new pods meet the customer demand increases that we expect in the very near future,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. “And they are only preliminary measures in our growth strategy for 2010. We have some big plans which we can’t wait to share with everyone.”  SoftLayer has standardized on the pod architecture for data center design, allowing them to optimize space, power, network, personnel and internal infrastructure. The company recently announced that it was on track to report more than $80 million in revenue for 2009 and raised $20 million to fund the continued growth of the company.
• Power Loft opens Virginia Data Center: Power Loft LLC announced the substantial completion of their first data center, Power Loft @ Innovation. Located in Prince William County, Virginia, this 225,000 square foot facility has signed an international IT technology outsourcing company as its anchor tenant, and was recently awarded the first Northern Virginia Technology Council’s Green Award. “Power Loft is in the forefront of creating energy efficient data center space,” said Bobbie Kilberg, President & CEO of the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC).  “Having our company singled out to receive the NVTC Green Award, turned four years of hard work into a very unexpected night of celebration for us all,” said Jim Coakley, CEO of Power Loft LLC. “We are very
  proud to be so honored and we commend the NVTC for elevating the visibility of the many companies in Northern
  Virginia who are making an increasingly positive impact on our environment.”
• Level 3 to support Clearwire’s 4G network. Level 3 Communications announced an expanded relationship with Clearwire Communications Tuesday to support their CLEAR 4G WiMax services.  The agreement provides Clearwire with network transport services as a part of their deployment of CLEAR WiMax services in major metropolitan markets across the United States. Level 3 will provide high speed connectivity to Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Seattle, Washington D.C., Houston and the Bay area.   CLEAR 4G WiMax is a next generation mobile internet solution from Clearwire that claims to be 4 times faster than 3G.  Clearwire has been growing rapidly and in their third quarter 2009 results reported that 4G network coverage increased by 67% to over 10 million people.  They also recently had a $1.564 billion equity financing round. Is there a map for that? – you bet.

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Roundup: SoftLayer, Power Loft, Level 3

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1201 Comstock is one of the Digital Realty data centers in Santa Clara, Calif. that has received a LEED Platinum certification.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – An unassuming industrial park near San Jose Airport is hardly where you’d expect to find some the greenest acres in the data center industry. The Santa Clara, Calif., campus operated by Digital Realty Trust is home to three data centers with a Platinum or Gold rating under the LEED standard for energy efficient buildings.

Digital Realty, the largest data center operator in the U.S., has used its Santa Clara operation to refine an energy efficient design using fresh-air cooling, which has made the site a magnet for some of the fastest-growing companies in the digital economy.

Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo all have their servers housed here. NVIDIA, which is seeking to harness its GPU technology to power cloud and high performance computing, has leased an entire data center here as well.

Clients Like LEED Data Centers
The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard is not designed with data centers in mind, and is just one of several indicators of the energy efficiency of a data center, along with Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). But there are signs that the LEED designation is growing in importance for data center tenants, who like the standard as a benchmark for corporate social responsibility.

Where LEED certification was once seen as a difficult hurdle for mission-critical sites, companies like Digital Realty are demonstrating the ability to build data centers to the very highest levels of the specification, and do so with remarkable speed. The two LEED Platinum facilities at the Santa Clara campus were completed in less than eight months, far less than the 18 to 24 months typically required for an enterprise data center project.

The campus is anchored by the carrier hotel at 1100 Space Park Drive, which was Digital’s first acquisition at the site and has tenants including AT&T, Verizon and Tata Communications. The operation has grown from there to include three other buildings:

• In 2007 Digital Realty bought an interest in an adjacent building at 1500 Space Park Drive, which it retrofitted to focus on the use of free cooling. In June, 1500 Space Park received a Gold certification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).
• In 2008 Digital Realty acquired 1201 Comstock Street, a former furniture store which borders 1100 Space Park. It gutted the structure, leaving only the walls standing, and converted the building into a finished data center in just 26 weeks. This fully-leased site recently earned LEED Platinum certification, the highest tier available, and achieved a peak power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.31 during the commissioning process.
• Next up was 1525 Comstock, which Digital Realty demolished and rebuilt from the ground up as a “greenfield” data center project, which was completed in 31 weeks. The site is fully leased to two brand name tenants. Digital Realty has submitted the site for LEED certification with enough points for a Platinum rating.

The energy efficiency of Digital Realty’s Santa Clara properties is driven by a design optimized to use fresh air in its cooling system, rather than relying on energy-intensive chillers and refrigerated water. This “free cooling” (also known as air economization) can be used for about 65 percent of the year in Silicon Valley. 

Side Plenums and Raised Floor
Each data center has air handlers located on its rooftop, which draw in outside air. The air handlers move the air through side plenums wrapping around the side of each server room, and under the raised floor area. The air then enters the cold aisles through perforated floor tiles, where it can cool tenant equipment, and exits through the ceiling.

Digital Realty employs a Turn-Key Datacenter design offering customer data center pods available in units of 1.125 megawatts. The company, which operates 13 million square feet of data center space, has been able to reduce costs and streamline construction using standard components and repeatable design concepts and leveraging its buying power with suppliers.  

Still Expanding in Santa Clara
It’s not done expanding in Santa Clara, either. Digital Realty has also bought the property next to 1500 Space Park and demolished the existing structure. It is currently marketing the site, which will be known as 1550 Space Park Drive, as a build-to-suit opportunity for a 6 megawatt data center.

The company has also deeded a tract of land between 1100 and 1500 Space Park Drive to the municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power, for a new substation to expand the power capacity for the campus.

Eaerlier this month Digital Realty spent $90 million to acquire two data center facilities on nearby properties. The facilities at 1350 Duane Avenue, and 3080 Raymond Street are both fully-leased to Internet service providers.

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In Santa Clara, ‘Green’ Speeds Toward Platinum

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Bay Area Internet Solutions has built a new 80,000 square foot data center in Santa Clara, Calif. that features an innovative economizer design. One end of the data center is lined with more than 200 fans to bring fresh air into an exterior “air corridor” that surrounds the data center. The air is then filtered and used in the facility’s cooling system. Bay Area Internet expects to be able to use the air economizers to provide free cooling for 85 percent of the year. This video was produced by Emerson Network Power and features its products, but also provides an inside look at an interesting new facility in the active Silicon Valley market. This video tour runs about 6 minutes 30 seconds.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

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Inside Bay Area’s New Santa Clara Site

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The first phase of CoreSite’s data center campus in Santa Clara, Calif. will be completed in the first quarter of 2010, the company announced today. The project, which was announced in May 2008, was initially scheduled to be open in 2009. But its arrival will help add inventory to a tight market for data center space in Silicon Valley, where several large projects were postponed due to the impact of the financial crisis.

Phase one of the CoreSite development will feature 50,000 square feet of data center space and eight megawatts of electrical capacity. CoreSite’s long-term plans include two additional 180,000 square foot data centers on the campus, which will have a total power capacity of 49 megawatts at completion.

CoreSite’s Santa Clara data center campus will be built to LEED Gold certification standards and features air-side economization, which reduces energy consumption by using outside air to cool the data center. The ability to use “free air” and other important energy efficient design aspects such as 95%-efficient UPS units, variable-speed fans, and zoned lighting will help to significantly reduce the Santa Clara data center’s Power Usage Effectiveness (P.U.E.). The highly-efficient design supports concurrent maintainability with a 2N UPS configuration, ensuring maximum uptime levels.

“CoreSite Santa Clara will showcase the company’s expertise in delivering high-value, reliable, and energy-efficient data centers from the ground up,” said Billie Haggard, CoreSite vice president of data centers. “The Santa Clara data center design combines what is best for our customers and what is best for the environment in a truly ‘win-win’ scenario.”‘

CoreSite estimates the total three-building Santa Clara data center investment at $350 million upon completion. In addition to the Santa Clara data center campus, CoreSite currently operates two other Bay Area data centers in Milpitas and San Jose, as well as eight other facilities across the United States.

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CoreSite Santa Clara Project Due in Early 2010

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A depiction of the server room design for the Sonoma Mountain Data Center in California, including projections on the amount of free cooling enabled by the design.

The “cash for clunkers” program has allowed thousands of Americans to help the environment by driving energy efficient cars. Now some old clunkers can help make a data center more efficient. 

The Sonoma Mountain Data Center will use metal from recycled automobiles in a sophisticated new cooling system for its server rooms, according to Tod Stebbins, the project manager for the new facility, which is part of the Sonoma Mountain Village sustainable community in Rohnert Park, Calif., about 40 miles north of San Francisco. 

The recycled light steel is manufactured at the Sonoma Mountain site, where community developer Codding Industries makes its own green building materials using technology from Genesis Worldwide. Old car parts are crushed and flattened into metal sheets that can be used in commercial building products.

Recycled Steel in Containment System 
The Sonoma data center is using the recycled metal in heat containment systems that will manage the airflow and temperature in high-density server cabinets. The facility is designed as a ”less than zero carbon” facility, combining high efficiency and on-site power generation. 

Sonoma Mountain Village is being developed as one of the world’s greenest communites, with sustainable design permeating nearly every facet of the mixed-use community of offices, retail and housing. That’s reflected in the 1 megawatt solar array that will help power the data center for up to 270 days a year.

Stebbins’ mandate was to extend that end-to-end emphasis on sustainability into the data center, which has its mechanical and electrical infrastructure in place and is being offered as shell space. “Of the air distribution designs we looked at when benchmarking ours, we never really found a method that was load-following or that operated without any oversupply of cold air, what we refer to as ‘zero waste’ cooling,” said Stebbins.

Custom Cooling Design
So the Sonoma team came up with its own approach. The resulting design uses industry best practices such as fresh air cooling, isolating waste heat from servers, and operating at a higher temperature in the cold aisle. 

The Sonoma server rooms feature a slab design rather than a raised floor, with computer room air handlers (CRAHs) housed in an adjacent galley. The cooling system, which Stebbins calls an “OnDemand Cooling Circuit,” physically separates warm and cold air throughout the facility. 

‘Smart Chimneys’ Manage Airflow
The lynchpin of the cooling design is the rack-top heat containment chimneys, which contain sophisticated pressure sensor systems from Opengate Data Systems that also monitor the IT load within each rack. The chimneys, which are made of the recycled metal, move air from the cabinet into a ceiling plenum, which then returns the waste air to the CRAH units.

Stebbins said the Sonoma data center is being designed to operate at 78 to 80 degrees F, at the upper end of the range recommended by industry groups. This will allow it to save money by using fresh air to cool server rooms, rather than relying upon refrigeration chillers that use large amounts of energy. In most climates, a warmer data center can use free cooling for more days each year.  

But warmer temperatures can also prompt increased activity by server fans, which kick on as the temperature rises, nullifying gains from a warmer server room. The Opengate system detects fan activity and adjusts the air flow and pressure to compensate (see our video demo of Opengate’s technology). 

“The Opengate system is so tight with the way it controls the air that you bring in only what the data center demands,” said Stebbins.

Recirculation Within Cabinets
Fan activity isn’t the only challenge presented by air flow issues within the cabinet. The ASHRAE Journal recently highlighted research by Syska Hennessy Group on the recirculation of hot air within cabinets, which found that pressure buildup behind servers can cause hot air to route around the outside or even the bottom of the cabinet, allowing it to mix with cool air at the server inlet. This problem becomes more acute as the power density of a cabinet increases.     

Stebbins said Opengate’s pressure-centric approach can address this challenge, and be customized at the rack-top level, allowing cabinets with different power densities to be adjacent to one another, rather than zoning the data center by power density.

Former HP Site
The Sonoma Mountain data center is a former HP/Agilent facility with two stories featuring about 60,000 square feet of space. Developer Codding Enterprises says it can convert the current shell space into a turn-key data center pods of 3,000 to 4,000 square feet in about four months. The facility hopes to gain Platinum certification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the rating system for energy efficient buildings overseen by the US Green Building Council.

Stebbins hopes Sonoma’s use of recycled metal from old cars will help fill its data center with environmentally-conscious tenants. But once that task is complete, he believes the approach could prove appealing to other data centers. “Without trying, it could turn into a product,” he said.

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Recycled Cars Drive Data Center Cooling

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The Fortune Data Centers facility in San Jose, Calif. has earned LEED Gold status.

Fortune Data Centers has earned Gold certification for its San Jose, Calif. data center under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program for energy-efficient buildings. The facility is among a handful of LEED Gold data centers, and Fortune believes it is the first multi-tenant data center to receive Gold Certification for all of its usable tenant space.

“With data centers expending enormous amounts of energy to power and cool servers and IT infrastructure, we’re challenging the industry to move faster and reach further than before in designing, constructing and operating facilities in a more energy-efficient manner,” said Rick Fedrizzi, President, CEO & Founding Chair, U.S. Green Building Council, which operates the LEED program. “We commend Fortune Data Centers for being leaders in the data center industry by earning LEED Gold Certification and realizing the economic and environmental benefits of green building.”

Recycling Focus for Construction
Fortune’s facility has a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.37 at full load, well below the industry average data center PUE of 2.0. Ninety six percent of construction waste was diverted from landfill, according to DPR Construction, meaning 1,137 tons of material were either recycled or re-used on site.

Fortune Data Centers’ energy efficiency features include a design that uses a slab floor and drops cool air into the data center from above, taking advantage of the natural tendency for denser cool air to fall while warm air rises.

Fortune also separated the hot and cold air with vinyl curtains between the top of the racks and the ceiling, preventing warm air from mixing back in with cool air for the servers. The facility employs water-side economization and highly-efficient cooling towers, as well as an advanced building management system to monitor and manage environmental conditions.

“We’re structuring our business so that customers can enjoy the benefits of LEED-certified data center space without paying a premium for it,” said John Sheputis, CEO of Fortune Data Centers. “We believe companies shouldn’t have to pay extra for energy efficiency, rather they should realize a reduction in costs. Fortune and our tenants are collaborating to maximize efficiencies, and our tenants receive 100 percent of the cost savings that result from saving energy.”

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Fortune Gets LEED Gold in San Jose

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Digital Realty Trust (DLR) has acquired two data center facilities in Santa Clara, Calif. for $90.5 million, the company said today. The facilities at 1350 Duane Avenue, and 3080 Raymond Street are adjacent to Digital Realty’s primary data center campus in Santa Clara, and are both fully-leased to Internet service providers.

The larger building, 1350 Duane Avenue, consists of 160,000 square feet of data center space. The entire building is leased on a triple net basis to Sprint, who in 2004 subleased the building to a major colocation provider. The second property at 3080 Raymond Street totals 25,000 square feet and is leased on a triple net basis to a Layer 42 Networks, which provides Internet services and business applications.

The announcement comes just days after Digital Realty signaled its intent to buy additional occupied data centers as income properties, which generate revenue through rent from existing tenants.

“The buildings are strategically located near our existing Santa Clara facilities and should benefit from our operational efficiencies,” said Scott Peterson, Senior Vice President of Acquisitions for Digital Realty Trust. “They are situated on a 5.56 acre site across from a Silicon Valley Power substation with 17.2 MVA of current power capacity expandable to 22.5 MVA.”

Digital Realty said its assumed a $52.8 million mortgage upon completion of the transaction, which bears interest at 5.42% and is interest-only through the initial maturity date of October 1, 2012.

“This acquisition illustrates the continued execution of our strategy to grow FFO (funds from operation) by investing in income producing facilities at attractive risk-adjusted returns,” said Peterson.

Digital Realty Trust is a real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns, acquires, develops and manages data center real estate. It owns 79 properties in 27 markets spanning 14 million square feet, including 1.9 million square feet of space held for redevelopment.

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Digital Realty Buys Santa Clara Data Centers

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