ttsp hwp seidel (Frankfurt) wins EMEA Datacenter Dynamics Award for GSI GreenCube mega data center.

Category 02: Data Centre Blueprints Winner: ttsp hwp seidel

Behind every cutting edge data centre are a number of great 'blueprint' design and management ideas. This Award is not about recognising the new thinking that paves the way for the next generation of facilities through design, project management and construction. Winners show innovation, efficient use of resources, future-proofing and delivery in their conceptual designs, which are an important part of the data centre industry's evolution.

This year's winner, the GreenCube, is a standalone large data centre with an IT load of 12MW and more than 10,000 servers and more than 50 petabytes of storage deployed on a steel shelf six stories high housed in a cube measuring 27x30x21m and technical building of 27x6x8m.

The GreenCube was built at a cost of 16.7m euros for a European research project. The CAPEX was less than 1,400 euros per kW of installed IT load.

The Tier II facility, with a PUE of 1.1, is six times denser than the average data centre, with 600W per cubic meter of white space. Cooling alone accounts for 4% of its IT load on a yearly average.

Steel was an important material for the design, as it can be reused once the facility is no longer required - it is found in the cabinet shelving, the roof and facade.

The design team said the key-challenge was to build a data centre with a gigantic IT-load for very little money on almost non-existing space. The team based its design on the MiniCube data centre and designed the redundancies of the infrastructure based on the requirements of the IT - no chiller was used (cooling is done using passive heat-exchanger doors) and UPS-systems and completely redundant supplies are limited to systems that need to fulfil strict SLAs.