Engineering giant Emerson opened the doors of a newly built enterprise data center at its corporate headquarters in St. Louis, Mo., for one day to showcase the state-of-the art facility whose design incorporates many energy saving elements, including a solar array.

The 35,000-square-foot facility is one of four the company is consolidating its global network of about 135 data centers into. It is equipped with a full array of power, cooling and monitoring technologies created by the company's data center solutions brand Emerson Network Power.

It houses 12,000 square feet of raised floor, half of which will be commissioned once it comes online for the first time in August, Emerson VP and CIO Steve Hassell said. The floor is raised by 36 inches and the facility's engineers deployed hot isle-cold isle cooling approach.

"It's all dry cooled," Hassell said. "It (uses) a combination of both traditional CRAC units, as well as Liebert high-density precision-cooling products."

The facility is connected to the local power grid by dual utility feeds. Its power back-up system includes two generators, the latest modular Liebert UPS units and an Alber battery.

Emerson said it anticipates the U.S. Green Building Council to issue the project a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification. Gold is second to highest of the certification program's four tiers.

Besides the 100 KW solar array, the data center's other energy saving measures include a reduced building footprint and maximized use of daylight.

The company deployed Dell 11G servers, carrying Intel's Nehalem-based chips, EMC storage equipment and Cisco networking solutions. The engineers also minimized the use of copper, deploying predominantly fiber cables and using Cisco's new Nexus 7000 series network switch.

The data center will be highly-virtualized, using VMware to achieve about 14 virtual servers per one physical machine to run applications that lend themselves to virtualization.

Over the coming years, Emerson plans to reduce its 100-plus data centers around the world to the said St. Louis facility, another comparable one in Iowa and two small colocations in Singapore and Europe for latency-sensitive applications, Hassell said.

The company is making the transition gradually, furthering the project when a technical upgrade or a system changeover takes place or when a colocation agreement expires, minimizing disruptiveness of the process.

"We're going with our large shared facilities first," Hassell explained. Once we "get the first ones under our belt (and are) able to show everybody that it wasn't a traumatic experience ... people will become less resistant to the idea."