Global Brand, Global Data Center

‍INDUSTRY CHALLENGE

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A global consumer products company was looking to build a modern, best-in-class facility that embraced their three core values – integrity, teamwork and total customer satisfaction. The facility needed to be built with open workspaces and the ability to support the needs of their burgeoning global e-commerce presence. Implementing technology for 24/7/365 access that was sustainable, energy efficient and capable of providing a seamless user experience was important. The company was also looking to invest wisely in a system that was scalable and could grow quickly as their needs expanded. To achieve their goals, the leadership set forth to design and build a data center that could handle high-density racks loads and a technology strategy that was scalable to meet their large global computing requirements.

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APPROACH

‍Leading Edge Design Group was chosen to help this consumer products company develop a design that could deliver on their requirement for a high density, energy efficient facility. Also, the company's leadership relied on Leading Edge Design Group throughout the construction process to manage the construction and complex integration of the data center with the new building systems. The data center design was unique in that it utilized high-temperature chilled water (55°F) set points to maximize free cooling savings. To validate that the data center would be able to support the very high density compute workloads at these design conditions, LEDG performed a Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD analysis to simulate the data center operating conditions and validate that the cooling would perform as planned.

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After the data center implementation, the company asked LEDG to perform data center functional testing to validate the actual performance of the power and cooling systems based on site conditions. To do so, LEDG utilized rack-mount load banks to simulate the expected high density compute environment and tested the cooling systems to verify performance and redundancy.

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This innovative, modern data center design also includes the following:
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• A hot aisle containment system with dropout ceiling panels. The aisle containment offers the benefit of extending the capacity of the cooling system and supports high-density racks. Dropout ceiling panels are interlocked with the gaseous re suppression system for the panels to ‘drop out’ if the system is going to discharge. High efficiency through high temperature, chilled water (CW) design with a CW supply temperature of 55-60° Fahrenheit rather than the conventional 40-45° Fahrenheit. Increasing the chilled water supply temperature maximizes the amount of economization (“free cooling”) hours.
• Redundant N + 1 design for power, cooling, and telecommunications is implemented – an industry best practice to incorporate redundancy.
• High-density design for power and cooling capacity and a maximum power load per rack.

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RESULTS

LEDG met the company's aggressive 18-month timeline and contained construction costs. The innovative, streamlined data center solution provides a seamless user experience, energy- efficiency and scalability, and high-density computing to support the organization’s growth in athletic performance products. The project also aligned with the company's commitment to lower energy use in every facility worldwide and integrate LEED elements into their renovations, tenant improvements, and new construction.
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