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German public utility RWE has converted a former pumping station at its Niederaussem power-generation plant, located near Cologne, into a data center. The facility now houses about 6,500 sq ft of data center space, supporting the company's IT requirements, the company said Friday.

The data center is a "twin" of another RWE facility at its Neurath site – about eight kilometers away. The infrastructure in each of the sites is a replica of the other, so it can take over in case one of them fails.

The company built the €20m facility as part o its enterprise-wide IT infrastructure consolidation project. RWE is centralizing all of its data centers around the country, expecting the initiative to result in €35m in annual savings.

The data center houses blade servers and takes advantage of virtualization. About half of Windows systems in the facility have been virtualized and about 1,300 of them run a private cloud.

It uses outside air for cooling and reuses IT exhaust heat for comfort heating in the plant's offices. Inside, the design uses cold-aisle containment.

The data center supports a number of critical applications, which include planning power-station deployment and energy trading.