An Inside Look Into a Twin Data Center Design and Build

Challenge

A financial services organization was experiencing rapid growth through an expanding client base. Its data center, however, was struggling to keep up with the new demands.

About the Authors

Steve Harris

Director, Forsythe Data Center Engineering Practice

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Matthew Royse

Managing Editor, Forsythe FOCUS Magazine

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The company’s IT team was required to add more load to its aging data center, but the building had reached its electrical design maximum, and the local power company was unable to provide additional capacity. Whereas the average data center in the U.S. is approximately 20 years old, this 30-year-old data center was well beyond its typical useful life expectancy. Through consolidation, optimization and virtualization initiatives, the company had been able to squeeze out an additional two years of power and cooling capacity.

Solution

The company engaged Forsythe and its data center engineering practice to assess its existing 5,600-square-foot data center to determine the best approach for meeting both current and future demands. A thorough 275-plus point assessment by Forsythe revealed that the existing data center would not be able to take the organization where they wanted and needed to go. Therefore, a new data center was recommended.

Initially, the financial services organization identified a new data center environment to replace the old as the best approach. However, as Forsythe took the company through the discovery process, a better—though decidedly unusual—solution emerged: design and build twin data centers, both approximately half the size of the planned single facility, to increase reliability and redundancy for the organization. These dual data centers, acting as active-active processing environments, would allow the IT organization to have the option in the future of downgrading or eliminating their outside disaster recovery service and using some or all of the operational expense to offset the capital building costs.

Focusing on these concerns, Forsythe developed scenarios for the two data centers. The challenge in any dual data center design is to ensure each data center fits into its unique geographic location. While the exteriors may differ, the interiors were designed identically to foster effective and efficient facility and IT operations.

Next, Forsythe created a data center facility concept plan. This “road map” included a preliminary scope of the project, preliminary floor plan drawings/schematics, and a preliminary capital budget. Since designing and constructing a data center is a large capital investment occurring infrequently, building an “approvable” business case requires significant time, effort and multiple plan iterations.

Forsythe also organized the site selection process, ruling out less “weather-friendly” locations and making sure each proposed data center was serviced by separate electrical substations and differing telecommunications central offices. It was important that the two data centers were separated by enough distance—so a single episode of severe weather couldn’t affect both data centers simultaneously—yet close enough to the company’s headquarters so the firm could easily staff all three locations.

Forsythe oversaw the entire dual data center design and build from start to finish, including assisting in general contractor and major subcontractor selection, supervising construction project management and commissioning the facilities.

Results

The result was two flexible, modular state-of-the-art data centers, designed and built identically to support an active-active operational model. The facilities are approximately 20 miles apart from each other, and both are Tier Level III designs (providing 99.982% availability) with 6-kilowatt cabinet footprint of redundant power, ultra-efficient UPS and N+1 cooling. Multiple-level physical security including numerous cameras, a building management system and an integrated audio/visual system are part of each facility. Additionally, all intradata center communication is achieved via 10GB fiber unified solutions.

These two data centers will help support the company’s growth plans during the years to come and allow IT to deliver services more effectively, efficiently and at a lower cost. Additionally, the building systems technologies incorporated into these new data centers have set the standard for future technology upgrades to other non-data-center properties owned and operated by the company.

Forsythe’s participation resulted in the project achieving a financial result $600,000 favorable to budget and finishing more than 90 days ahead of schedule.