Colocation provider Terremark has chosen to install flywheel-based UPS units at the new data center under development in Santa Clara, Calif. The company ordered the systems from its existing vendor Active Power, whose UPS units have also been deployed at Terremark's Culpeper, Va., facility, Ben Stewart, SVP of facilities engineering at Terremark, said.

Stewart said the company chose to deploy the flywheel units instead of battery-based ones because of their efficiency, low maintenance requirements and relatively small size. "We're seeing 98-percent efficiency with the flywheels," he said, adding that the highest efficiency that could be achieved with some of the top static solutions out there was 96 percent.

The speed with which the system switches to its own power in case of a main-feed failure was a major factor as well, with the average interval between 10 seconds and 15 seconds.

Active Power UPS flywheel assembly

The site under development is one of three Terremark has on Corvin Drive in Santa Clara. Its first 30,000-square-foot facility there (3030 Corvin Dr.) is full, according to Stewart. The new site (expected to be online by April 1 of this year) is at 3000 Corvin Dr. Once complete, it will yield 12,000 square feet of data center floor.

While still in construction phase, most future space at the 3000 facility has been pre-leased, Stewart said. Terremark's third adjacent site (2940 Corvin Dr.) will net about 40,000 square feet of data center space. The company has not began building that site out.

Each of the three parcels receives 4.5 MW of power from Silicon Valley Power.

The company's facility in Culpeper has about 10 MW of Active Power UPS units deployed and the company has recently purchased another 10 MW from the vendor, Stewart said.