DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) said yesterday that it has completed the second phase of its ACC4 data center in Ashburn, Virginia. The 348,000 square foot facility, which will house servers for Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo, features some of the most extraordinary power infrastructure yet seen in the data center industry. As power usage at data centers continues to grow, the new DuPont Fabros facility may offer a glimpse into the future of infrastructure for premium data centers.
The ACC4 facility has a 36.4MW power feed from Dominion Virginia Power, and is supported by 32 huge 2.25MW diesel generators. The building has four 50,000 gallon tanks of diesel fuel tanks for a total of 200,000 gallons of storage, enough to run the facility on generator power for up to 55 hours during a grid outage. To protect against short-term power outages, ACC4 has 32 rotary power (flywheel) systems that can each produce 1.3MW of output to maintain power until the generators can start.
The 36MW power draw places ACC4 into the upper tier of facility-wide data center power usage. Microsoft has reportedly arranged 48 megawatts of power for its 470,000 square foot data center in Quincy, Washington, while Equinix has lined up 36MW from PSE&G; for its 340,000 square foot NJ3 data center, which is nearing completion in Secaucus, New Jersey.