Unisys New Zealand has unveiled plans to expand its datacenter in Kapiti, near Wellington, making a further significant investment in New Zealand and doubling the capacity of the facility. Work has commenced on the project, and Unisys expects the expanded parts of the facility to be commissioned during October 2008.
A key feature of the expansion is the incorporation of a movable floating wall, which allows the interior wall of the datacenter to be extended outwards as client demand increases. This modular approach is designed to restrict the space to be cooled to the area that is physically being used, limit overall energy consumption and improve resource utilisation.
As part of the expansion, new technologies will be implemented that incorporate free cooling techniques and infrastructure. These combine traditional under-floor process cooler technology with supplementary overhead cooling capable of supporting up to 2000 watts per square metre. By using a combination of different cooling techniques, the company expects to achieve over 25% percent savings in power consumption over a year.
In addition Unisys plans to install rain water tanks onsite to provide cooling infrastructure in the form of humidity water feeds into the computer room, thereby providing resilience from water supply failures.
Putting bad air to good use, the new infrastructure also features heat exchange options so that Unisys on site offices can be heated with the heat by-product from datacenter.
The facility will be supported by a 2MW power plant. The modular approach Unisys has adopted to providing power and cooling will see the site grow only as customer demand and need dictates for many years in the future.
"Rather than build a large, resource-hungry environment to meet as-yet-undefined customer needs, we have designed this facility to expand so that we can scale building size, power supply and cooling as demand grows, says Unisys New Zealand managing director, Brett Hodgson.
The expansion of Kapiti comes less than a year after Unisys completed the installation of dual (redundant) mains power feeds from a separate sub station into the Kapiti Datacenter, which included the purchase of a second larger diesel generator. It reflects the growth in demand for high availability datacenter services.
"Datacenter managers are fast running out of space as they grapple with increasing energy, cooling and regulatory requirements, says Hodgson. "These challenges are driving organisations to green' datacenters for efficiency purposes and costs reduction as well as seeking to reduce their environmental footprint.
"If your data is valuable you want high availability. And that, increasingly, means a datacenter. The rapid growth Unisys is experiencing in the number of rack-mounted servers we manage is a clear reflection of the growing local demand for efficient managed datacenter services. By expanding our datacenter now we are meeting our clients' current needs for capacity and green' services, and also future-proofing our business as capacity demand continues to increase.
The Kapiti datacenter site is capable of expanding a further 1000 square metres beyond the existing facility and planned expansion.
The Unisys datacenter at Kapiti hosts rack-mounted servers which allow IT managers to achieve high availability performance by mitigating the energy consumption problems associated with concentrating them in inappropriate environments. Once servers are in the Unisys datacenter, Unisys can offer server consolidation and server virtualisation to create further energy efficiencies.
The Kapiti datacenter is connected to Unisys Auckland datacenter via an MPLS core backbone, providing a carrier-class, private, flexible and redundant networking infrastructure running on independent fibre loops. Together the two datacenters form a data ecosystem that allows the deployment of services and interconnectivity between peered systems. This means Unisys can not only offer customers a geographic choice; it also enables more comprehensive disaster recovery solutions by replicating customer systems and services at two sites. The architecture of the ecosystem allows both services and management to be provided independent of the customer's physical location, thereby maximising resource efficiencies and minimising risk.