Fujitsu has added two new data center buildings at the Akashi System Center, the company's main data center campus that serves western Japan.

The two new buildings are different in size and in level of earthquake resiliency. One of the facilities is seismically isolated and the other is a “standard-spec” data center for lower-cost outsourcing services.

While engineers that design data centers in earthquake-prone Japan have traditionally been very conscious of earthquake-proofing the buildings, the industry has been putting a lot more emphasis on this aspect of design since the disastrous Tohoku earthquake in March 2011 that was followed by a tsunami.

The top-spec facility (the seismically-isolated one) has capacity for 500 IT racks, and the provider plans to expand it to 1,000. The lower-spec data center supports 100 racks and be expanded to 600.

Capacity in the data centers will be expanded incrementally due to the extensive use of modularity in their design.

Both data centers take advantage of outside air to reduce cooling costs. The free-cooling capacity can be supplemented with mechanical cooling when necessary, the company said.

To optimize for energy efficiency, designers of the facilities used computational fluid dynamics simulations for server room layouts.

The older data center at the Akashi site was launched in 1997. The company's other main Japanese data center, called Tatebayashi System Center, came online in 1995.

Fujitsu has about 70 data centers in Japan total and 40 outside of the country. It uses the facilities to provide a variety of ICT outsourcing services, including cloud infrastructure.

Overall, Japan's data center industry survived the Tohoku earthquake rather well. Atsushi Yamanaka, member of the Japan Data Center Council, told us following the disaster that no critical data center failures had been reported to the council.

The worst effects of Tohoku for the industry were the rolling brownouts Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) undertook periodically because a substantial portion of its generation capacity had been damaged by the disaster.