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• Data Center Designed for 500 Watts/SF

  • By: Rich Miller
    November 28th, 2006
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  If you track the data center industry, you’re probably used to seeing impressive numbers for power loads and data center engineering. But I took notice of a mention of “the world’s highest density data center at 500 Watts/SF” in an article at Data Center Journal (link via John Rath). The story, which announces a new Denver-area data center for CH2M HILL, makes a passing reference to the fact that the engineering firm designed this way-high-density data center.

  So who’s the tenant requiring 500 watts per square foot? The project is described in a PDF document on the CH2M Hill web site, noting that the project is for a “confidential client.” The IDC Architects web site has additional information, which doesn’t name the client but identifies the facility’s location – Hillsboro, Oregon. Some quick Googling reveals that Hillsboro is the site of several data centers, including facilities operated by Fortix/ViaWest and The Spine Group. But the obvious suspect in Hillsboro is the Sun Solution Center where Sun Microsystems runs stress tests on high-performance computing applications.

  
  “The HPC benchmarking group runs numerically intense scientific or technical applications in fields such as MCAE, seismic processing, financial modeling, signal processing, oil reservoir simulation, and computational fluid dynamics,” Sun notes in describing its work at Hillsboro. That would explain why Sun would need all that power capacity.

  Is this the “world’s highest density data center?” I suspect there may be others in this range in the works. If you know of an installation with similar specs, feel free to share your insight in the comments. In any event, the documents are an interesting read.



Charlie Quidnunc

Posted November 28th, 2006

ACS is there also, running all of Nike and other clients.



Rob Roy

Posted December 4th, 2006

The diagram on the CH2M Hill web site looks like an intel design from 24/7 in Orlando. At the conference they explained that it was not a complete mission critical design though. The site was lacking any generator backup.If the utility was off for longer than the UPS battery run time then the sites go dark.



John Hiser

Posted December 8th, 2006

IDC Architects is the engineer of record for this facility. It is designed as a high end super computing facility and has generators backing up the critical loads but not compute servers. The facility design includes the capability of adding additional generators for 100% backup of server load. We designed this facility as well as others in the 400-500 w/sf range. Please call for additional questions or comments; 503-872-4644

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