The First Facility Management Blog

APC, a provider of integrated critical power and cooling services, has announced it has partnered with Sun Microsystems to design a portion of the company’s new energy efficient data center in Santa Clara, CA. Commissioned as part of Sun’s Eco InnovationSM Initative, the rack-based data center leverages a flexible, scalable APC InfraStruXure® InRow™ cooling solution that enables Sun to reduce the cost and environmental impact of maintaining its high density IT systems. In addition, APC’s software solutions enable Sun to monitor environmental disruptions throughout the data center to ensure efficiency and eliminate downtime.

APC provided Sun with 18 InfraStruXure Hot-Aisle Containment Systems for Sun’s new 13,000 square foot software research data center. The 18 hot-aisle containment systems use a total of 450 enclosures, which include 230 APC NetShelter® VX and 220 Sun racks. Each of these hot-aisle containment systems operate at an average of 5 kW of heat load per rack and use APC’s innovative InRow cooling solutions to cool the load. Cooling capacity is pre-piped to enable placement of additional InfraStruXure InRow RC cooling units into each data center system, bringing the overall cooling capacity to a 9 kW average per rack.

While this implementation can sustain an average of 9 kW per rack, much higher density racks can be incorporated with lower density racks to take full advantage of the flexibility of the InfraStruXure Hot-Aisle Containment System. APC partnered with Sun to design and implement the suspended hot-aisle containment systems to work with any type of rack. The design allows Sun to add or subtract racks from each data center system. In addition, an overhead flap system helps to contain the hot aisle air, a requirement due to the differences in enclosure heights.

To provide the essential energy efficiency demanded as part of the Sun Eco Innovation Initiative, while still accommodating future data center growth, Sun also installed three APC 800kW Symmetra® MW uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) across two lab buildings. Testing proved that the Symmetra MW offered Sun up to 97% efficiency and that, over a 10-year period, the possible energy savings to the company could exceed $1 million on the three installed UPS systems. The Symmetra MW scales from 400kW to 1.6MW.

“Given the remarkable pace with which our company’s computing environments are evolving, we are challenged with the need to effectively and efficiently power and cool our data centers,” said Michael Ryan, staff engineer in the WR Global Lab and Data Center Design Services group at Sun Microsystems. “With this challenge comes a commitment on Sun’s part to maintain an energy efficient data center that will address our capacity needs while still reducing environmental impact and costs. APC has created modular, scalable cooling systems and UPS units that fit the flexible and adaptable nature of our next-generation data center demands and enable us to easily accommodate future growth. We greatly appreciate the partnership with APC to design and install its innovative InfraStruXure Hot-Aisle Containment Systems at our Santa Clara campus and look forward to working with the company on upcoming sites.”

To ensure that Sun can consistently distribute power and monitor and maintain conditions within its data center environment, each IT enclosure includes two APC switched Rack Power Distribution Units (PDUs) and an APC Environmental Monitoring Unit. In addition, the data center room is monitored by APC Netbotz surveillance cameras that tie into APC’s InfraStruXure Central management platform.

“The new Sun Microsystems data center in Santa Clara is an ideal example of the kind of next-generation architecture that can and will help alleviate some of the environmental and economic strain that today’s high density computing is placing on the industry,” said Rob Johnson, senior vice president and president of North America at APC-MGE. “We are honored to have been selected for the task of helping build this software data center and believe we have designed and installed a solution that is highly efficient, extremely reliable and will support the evolving needs of Sun well into the future.”