Sun finishes major data centre consolidation project

Sun Microsystems has consolidated a nine-building ex-Storagetek data centre campus into a new multi-storey facility, cutting its floor space requirements by more than half.

The new data centre, based in Broomfield, Colorado, has been designed using Sun’s Pod architecture (see photo gallery right).

This divides the centre into a series of self-contained building blocks that are said to be able to scale up or down depending on compute requirements.

Sun claims to have compressed approximately 46,079 square metres of data centre space at the previous StorageTek campus down to 11,705 square metres, primarily using the pod architecture.

The highest density section of the new site is said to include 19 ‘fully-scaled’ pods.

Sun also said it avoided building some 7,400 square metres of raised floor space in the new facility, resulting in ‘cost avoidance’ in the region of US$4 million.

The company said it had calculated both current and future weight loads to assist with equipment placement and structural reinforcement needs.

It also said that migrating equipment to the new facility had uncovered weight issues that could have posed structural problems for customers.

“Moving the largest tape configuration- ten Sun StorageTek 8500 libraries that act as one virtual device and can store over 14 Petabytes of data – revealed that the floor flexed up to three inches,” said Sun.

“By consolidating data centres, this potential customer problem was identified and resolved before it was experienced externally.”

The data centres covered by the consolidation include engineering, services, and IT facilities that serve development groups in Sun’s storage business unit and corporate and customer support, the company said.

The average cabinet load in the new centre is approximately 8kW, but Sun said the pods are capable of handling ‘varying rack loads up to 30kW’.

Sun said it will also use free cooling for ‘one-third of the year’ and that it would use dynamic cooling technology from Liebert, a water-side economiser, flywheel UPS and variable frequency drives on fan coils, motors and pumps to minimise environmental impact of the facility.