The Central Bank of Costa Rica is tasked with maintaining the country’s economic stability. It provides services to the government and financial institutions, is responsible for monetary and exchange rate policy and managing the country’s international reserves.

In April, the bank started migrating technologies from a traditional data center to a new micro data center, designed to support the economy’s growth and its increasing use of modern technologies.

Gaining Independence
This new enterprise facility has been designed with more than just capacity in mind. When tasked with building a new infrastructure the operations teams had to consider the entire nation’s ideals for growth as well as the historical challenges they had faced with this facility.

Costa Rica is no different to more mature economies. Technology is becoming critical to its national banking culture and the country’s economic growth.

The incorporation of an electronic payments system and a digital wallet are just two projects that define the important role that technology will play in the future of Cost Rica.

Reducing the use of coins, according to Rafael Marín Cruz, the architect of the bank’s administrative division, will have a huge impact on the country’s wealth.

“This is because we do not issue coins locally,” Marín Cruz said. “This is a very expensive process for the country.”

Marín Cruz said these issues had to be kept in mind when the team was reconsidering its aging data center infrastructure.

The original bank headquarters, inside which the new and old data center are located, is a 60-year-old structure. Compute operations up until 2012 were located on the north west of the building, which now has an outside wall surrounded by glass.

This setup posed its own problems with heat transfer. One analysis performed by the bank’s infrastructure teams shows the glass temperature could exceed 37°C at times.

The old facility had a raised floor and plenum with electrical wiring inside, leaving just 5cm in some areas for airflow. Two air conditioning units were used inside the old data center but these were placed perpendicular to each other, causing further cooling issues.

A structural study had also raised concerns about data center load. This included 150 sq m of raised floor and equipment, which exceeded the design load of the building itself.

After careful deliberation and budgetary plannint (this is, after all, a bank) it was decided to relocate the data center to a space on the same floor but in the most structurally secure part of the building. This area comprised ducts and elevators so structural reinforcement to beams had be carried out for the mezzanine space using carbon fiber, which is a relatively new process in Costa Rica.

Tier III Enriched
The bank had considered building a Tier IV data center but a cost/benefit analysis pointed the operations team towards a Tier III design instead, with the possibility of upgrading to Tier IV once the budget had been increased. The build began in 2013 following several delays.

The Central Bank of Costa Rica has only just recently opened the facility and is currently migrating data from its old site.

A parallel project has focused on virtualizing and consolidating the bank’s server count.

By the end of 2012, when construction had started, the bank had already reduced the number of its physical servers from 150 to 100. This project and future consolidation plans now mean the bank has a footprint of 108 sq m, with 80 sq m white space, which is almost half the space of its previous data center design.

The data center has 16 42U racks, each designed to reach 10kW. Five of these are used for telecommunications, and at least two are set aside for future growth.

InRow Cooling
The bank has also made its new data center more energy efficient, by deploying a redundant cooling system with three feeds to modular chillers. Only two of the 20-tonne cooling units are currently in use.

A raised floor has been added and InRow cooling. The bank already has some plans regarding future virtualization and consolidation demands. Marin Cruz says his teams will be able to introduce hot aisle containment to reduce cooling needs further.

The facility has additional power secured for growth, with 160kW available – only 40kW is expected to be used in early stages. It is using the same feed that came in for its older facility but is backing this up with a new 200kW subtation that will be built especially for the facility.

Overall, according to Marin Cruz, the bank has used a micro modular  design to create a lot more capacity at a lower operational cost. And this places Costa Rica in a position to meet its financial challenges in the future.