New data center Rackspace in the UK: photo tour and features of the new DC

From a distance, it all seems small, but the DC area is two football fields

Large telecommunication companies are constantly expanding their capacities as customers become more and more, and customers' demands are increasing. Rackspace is no exception. At the end of last month, this company launched a new data center , which is located in the UK, Crowley (approximately 50 km from London). The new data center introduced a lot of interesting technologies to save resources and work more efficiently.

According to the company's management, this data center is the largest in the country where indirect (indirect) cooling technology is used, with outdoor air intake. Through the use of this and some other technologies, the company was able to achieve PUE = 1.15 with an average value of PUE for other data centers in 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
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Multi-level security system includes external perimeter using employee card scanners.


About 80 company employees work here.

This data center also uses Open Compute Project (OCP) technology. It is worth recalling that Facebook was the ideologue and founder of this concept, and the consortium itself was founded in 2011. Currently, 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 capacity 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 the power supply capacity of up to 30 MW. In total, you can host more than 50 thousand servers. The suburb of London was chosen due to the presence in the region of modern energy infrastructure. In addition, in Crowley, the company managed to acquire land for its data center relatively inexpensively (presumably, in the suburbs of London, the land is not cheap at all).





New cooling system, as mentioned above, saves significant funds. The average annual temperature of the region is lower than in many other countries, and the indirect air cooling system here can be used without any problems, active cooling with the help of refrigeration equipment is practically not used. At the same time, air-to-air heat exchangers are installed in the system, 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 into the machine rooms with a slight pressure drop.



Inside the closed circuit, the 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 included 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 with outside air is possible).


Sunlight transmitted through optical fiber is used to illuminate machinery and utility rooms during daytime.







Servers and other network equipment operates 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 harvesting system (and there is a lot of rain in the region).



The total savings resulting from the use of all these systems range from 40 to 55 euros per kW of load per month.


If necessary, the DC can accommodate much more equipment than is installed now.

A few weeks ago, the company's data center received an “Excellent” rating from BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method). According to representatives of Rackspace, this DC is the “greenest” in the UK.


The security system is also high

Now there are several dozen people working in DC.