It is one thing to fortify a wall and equip a perimeter with surveillance cameras. Keeping hundreds of servers not only secure, but running around the clock and ensuring enough capacity for future scale-up is an entirely different ball game. While having trusted its subsidiary KBR with building military bases for the US government, Halliburton leaves construction and operation of the data center that houses its global production servers to the pros.
The many-faceted corporation, whose core business is providing oil-field services to energy companies, keeps its production server racks at a facility built and operated by CyrusOne –among the largest colocation data center providesr in the state of Texas.
With data centers in Dallas, Houston and Austin, CyrusOne has attracted clients from the likes of Dynegy (one of the largest energy wholesalers in the US, with generation capacity of about 13,000 MW) and Rent-a-Center, the largest operator of rent-to-own stores in the US that controls nearly 40 percent of its market and owns about 3,000 stores.
The data center provider was one of the few companies that have recently been able to gain access to a large amount of capital. At the end of October, the company announced that it had secured new-credit capacity for $150 million, despite the tough credit markets. CyrusOne is owned by Abbry Partners, a Boston, Mass., private equity firm which currently represents about $22 billion of investment money.
The case for unadulterated colocation services
One of the provider’s key differentiators in the data center market is its strict focus on colocation services. “We’ve not been tempted by the cloud-computing or the managed-services space and there’s a couple of reasons why,” said CyrusOne General Manager John Greenwood. One reason is that it wants to remain neutral and not be a threat to a potential client’s internal IT staff.
The other is the desire to give its customers the ability to choose managed-service providers that best suit their needs.
“They can overlay those services across our infrastructure and … get more leverage across their partnerships,” Greenwood said. “In the event that they need to uncouple that relationship with their managed-services provider, they can do so without uprooting their mission-critical IT production.”
By focusing on providing one service well and on maintaining strong relationships with its key clients, the company earns their loyalty. “Our churn rate is less than two percent. Contract renewal (rate) is 98 percent. When you get into the managed-services business, there can be the potential for a lot of finger-pointing; a lot of fractured relationships and things like that.”
CyrusOne does provide on-site technical services – such as equipment installation, cabling and tape back-up – if its clients need them. It also offers a lot of help with migrating its clients’ equipment from their old data centers to its own.
A large Dallas footprint
Halliburton is an anchor client in CyrusOne’s largest campus to date, located in the Convergence Technology Center in Lewisville – a Dallas suburb. The company is leasing four buildings in the 185-acre business park that is also home to enterprise data centers of corporations like Fidelity, GMAC, Overhead Door, JP Morgan and Texas Instruments.
The fourth and final data hall in one of the buildings was commissioned several weeks ago, Greenwood said. The building provides about 45,000 square feet of raised floor. Halliburton takes up about half the space in Data Hall 1. Three of the data halls are nearly full and the fourth hall is still awaiting its first occupant.
CyrusOne has recently commissioned the fourth data hall in one of its Convergence Technology Center buildings
Two of everything
The facility’s electrical and mechanical infrastructure is designed in a full 2N configuration from the cabinet power feeds down to redundant generators. “Literally from the cabinet, customers are plugged into an A-side infrastructure and a B-side infrastructure and there’s no parallel gear.
“When we’ve lost utility power, the design has always worked,” Greenwood added. This has happened only once, when the data center lost utility power for about 15 minutes during an ice storm in 2008.
The facility’s operators monitor the amount of power on each side of the redundant infrastructure, using load balancing to put 40 percent of the load on side A and 40 percent on side B. “We’re monitoring that on an aggregate level so that if you exceed 80 percent, we’ll notify customers because at that point, your systems are at risk (because) you’ve overloaded the circuit.”
Cooling set-up
The data center floor is raised by three feet and its ceiling is lowered by five feet, forming a plenum. “It’s a dual-plenum type of a design and we’ve found it to be extremely efficient,” Greenwood said. Air is taken out of the hot aisles and vented into the plenum above. It is then cooled and re-circulated under the raised floor. CyrusOne deployed Stulz cooling infrastructure at the Convergence facility.
CyrusOne Dallas-area facility uses Stulz cooling equipment
The company’s engineers use computational fluid dynamics software prior to construction as well as when facilities are operational, to manage their customers’ environments to ensure proper air movement and to prevent temperature irregularities. CFD models are also done with customers on proposed layouts before their equipment is installed.
No real-time monitoring of temperature and humidity takes place in the data center, although its operators do occasional spot checks. “That’s what the CFD tool is really all about. It’s to make sure that we’re set up properly in the first place,” Greenwood explained.
Dodging a bullet early on
CyrusOne was founded in 2000 and, with headquarters in Houston, its initial focus was on providing colocation services to energy companies. “That was prior to the dotcom bubble bursting. We could’ve gone after technology companies – like a lot of our peers did – but we elected to go after what we felt was an underserved market.”
The company has since branched out and today serves a range of industries from financial services to manufacturing, retail and technology firms.
As was the case with Halliburton, CyrusOne was many of its clients’ first data center outsourcing partner.
Its typical customers are looking for better uptime, power and cooling capacity than their own facilities can offer. The development of newer server and storage technologies has proven to be beneficial for CyrusOne, as customers have been finding their own data centers to be inadequate in supporting new equipment.
Another big growth driver is consolidation, Greenwood said. “We’re working with companies that may have anywhere from 50 to 100 different server rooms and they’re looking to consolidate that into a couple of key data center locations.”
Before entering a new market and building a new facility, the company always secures an anchor tenant for that facility. Its entry into the Dallas market was caused directly by Halliburton’s desire to locate its servers there.
“Nothing we do is ever done on speculation,” Greenwood said. “A new market or a new data hall – we’re always going in with an anchor tenant.”
Related news: CyrusOne secures $150 million for data center expansion
Related feature: The confidence of the colocation market
Related conference: DatacenterDynamics Dallas
