The building housing VMware's new data center was built by Sabey

Earlier this week virtualization technology giant VMware unveiled its new data center in East Wenatchee, Wash. VMware Director of Business and Operations for R&D Mark Thiele – who was in charge of the project – provided DatacenterDynamics with an in-depth look at the company’s most efficient data center to date and at the process of designing and building it.

The project’s goals were to expand the company’s engineering and R&D capacity, as well as to provide a facility to house some of the IT infrastructure that had spilled over from its existing data centers into various colocation facilities – a solution that had become too expensive. The facility’s geographic location also makes it appropriate for use as a disaster recovery site.

VMware began a study to identify the best location about two years ago. After narrowing a number of places down to two, the company decided to go with Wenatchee, Wash. Executives were hoping to receive a tax break the state government was contemplating at the time but when the legislative initiative failed to go through the company decided Wenatchee was still the best choice.

By acquiring a data center in Washington, VMware joined a group of large technology companies that chose to locate their enterprise data centers in the state because of its mild climate and cheap and abundant hydroelectric power. The VMware facility is powered 100 percent by power generated by hydroelectric plants.

Need-based design
“Our philosophy (was) to build the data center from the inside out,” Thiele said. The team assessed the company’s needs in terms of IT equipment that would be housed inside the facility and designed the infrastructure to support that equipment.

A key element in that assessment process was putting together a “Guidance Council,” consisting of senior company executives, including the CIO. The council identified the needs VMware was expecting the new data center to satisfy, as it would be serving multiple organizations within the company.

“It’s a fairly unique process,” Thiele said. Council’s wishes in hand, he was able “to look at the project team and say: we’re delivering based on what our executives asked of us.”

The data center was designed for phased scalability, bringing each additional phase online once every 12-18 months. This week VMware announced opening of the two initial phases. Each phase provides about 16,000 square feet of data center floor and houses about 500 racks.

Phase one of the data center is used for engineering and R&D purposes and phase two provides IT capacity for various VMware organizations. The engineering and R&D portion has portable racks, while racks on the IT side are attached to the floor.

Phase one was built to loosely follow Uptime Institute’s Tier 1 redundancy guidelines and the second phase was built to reach a level of redundancy that is close to Tier 2 specifications. Thiele conceded that the facility did not have every redundancy feature Uptime would require for it to be considered a Tier 2 data center.

The project took about 11 months to complete.

Efficiency measures
One of the facility’s key energy efficiency features are its use of airside economization. Area climate allows the data center’s operators to take advantage of free cooling almost 365 days per year.

Cold-air aisles are isolated from hot-air aisles in the engineering portion of the facility. “There’s no mixing of hot and cold air,” Thiele said. “All of the open spaces have panels or servers blocking air flow.”

Construction of the hot-aisle containment system

The data center does not have raised floors, with cool air coming down through an overhead air distribution system from roof-top air conditioning units. Hot air removed from the IT equipment is used to heat air received from the economizers (when necessary) and for office heating. A shared-plenum cooling system is deployed in the building.

Finally – and not surprisingly – the facility makes extensive use of virtualization to maximize efficient use of IT equipment.

Power infrastructure
The data center’s total power demand is about 22 MW, according to state environmental review documents. The facility receives utility power through a substation that was built for it.

A new electrical substation was built specifically for the VMware facility

The power is backed up by 16 Cummins 2000DQKAB diesel-powered generators, each capable of supplying 2 MW of power. The generators are housed inside the building. According to state documents, VMware is limited to using no more than about 326,000 gallons of fuel per year, providing for 44 hours of emergency operation and 76 hours of low-load testing for each generator.

VMware plans to use only 11 out of the 16 total 2-MW Cummins generators at a time

Although VMware looked into flywheel-based UPS systems, it went with solid-state systems at the end, concluding that the process of investigating flywheels would take too long for the efficiency improvements the technology promised, Thiele said. The team went with Eaton’s Powerware 9350 UPS units instead.

“We’re expecting 97-percent efficiency, based on the load that we’re expecting to put on them,” he said, explaining that an average UPS system that has been used for about a two-year period provides 88-94 percent energy efficiency.

Not a Taj Mahal
“This is very much an industrial facility,” Thiele said. “(When) most of us think about data centers, we think of this operating-room type of environment. It looks like a place where work is done. The floors aren’t even painted. We’ve got thin sheet metal that walls off the hot from the cold.

“We weren’t trying to build it to be a Taj Mahal. We were trying to build it to be effective.”

VMware’s partners on the project were a number of architectural and construction firms, including Callison, McKinstry, Alfa Tech and Sabey.

The building that houses the data center is one of numerous buildings in the state built and owned by Sabey, a Seattle, Wash.-based design and construction firm that specializes in commercial buildings.

One of other such Sabey properties is on a parcel adjacent to the one occupied by VMware, according to state documents. It houses a 30-MW T-Mobile data center that opened in April.

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