The new facility will be a “greenfield” construction project optimized for modular (containerized) data centers, and will build upon the designs being implemented in eBay’s first modular project in Phoenix, Arizona.

Winterstreet and AHA previously teamed with EDI on the winning entry in the design contest for eBay’s Phoenix project. Other finalists in the Quicksilver competition included Advanced Design Consultants; the team of Deerns & Gensler; KlingStubbins; and M+W Group, which each received a design fee for their efforts in reaching the final round.

“We had really cool designs come in,” said Dean Nelson, Senior Director of Global Foundation Services at eBay. ”In my personal opinion, the public RFP design process has been extremely successful in driving creativity and innovation from a gamut of talented companies and individuals in the industry. The big ideas and design stretching requirements have given birth to entirely new ways to approach data center design in alignment with IT workload efficiencies.”

The eBay data center in West Jordan, Utah, will soon be expanded to include a second phase that will incorporate data center modules.

When eBay announced a design competition for a new modular data center at its campus near Salt Lake City, it was flooded by 68 entries. On Friday eBay said it has narrowed the field to five finalists for the new facility, known as Project Quicksilver, which will build upon the designs implemented in eBay’s first modular project in Phoenix, Arizona. Like the first open RFP, the process will be conducted through Data Center Pulse.

The five finalists were Advanced Design Consultants; the team of Deerns & Gensler; KlingStubbins; M+W Group; and the team of Winterstreet Architects & AHA Consulting Engineers. Winterstreet and AHA teamed with EDI on the winning entry in the design contest for eBay’s Phoenix modular data center. Each of the finalists will be receiving a design fee for their efforts in reaching the finalists round.

In this video from Data Center Pulse, eBay Senior Director of Global Foundation Services Dean Nelson interviews Mike Lewis, Director of Mission Critical Engineering at eBay and James Monahan, Partner at CDCDG about the Public RFP process, scoring and selection of the finalists for Project Quicksilver.

The eBay Prject Topz data center in West Jordan, Utah, in the shadow of the Oquirrh Mountains. The second phase of the campus will be modular, the company said today.

eBay plans to build a new fully modular data center near Salt Lake City, Utah, and is launching an “open RFP” process to invite design submissions. The project was announced today by Dean Nelson, the Senior Director of Global Foundation Services at eBay. The new data center will be the second phase of the company’s Project Topaz campus in South Jordan, Utah.

The new facility will be a “greenfield” construction project optimized for modular (containerized) data centers, and will build upon the designs being implemented in eBay’s first modular project in Phoenix, Arizona.

For the Phoenix project, eBay selected a design from a team of EDI, AHA Consulting Engineers and Winterstreet Architects, whose proposal was deemed the strongest among 20 entrants in the original open RFP, which was designed to prompt innovation in data center design using modular data centers, which are typically built in a factory and assembled on-site, resulting in a faster and cheaper construction process.

Like the first open RFP, the process will be conducted through Data Center Pulse. The eBay Salt Lake City RFP will be published Friday, Aug. 19 on the group’s web site. Here’s the announcement from Nelson in a video from Data Center Pulse.

Dean Nelson, of eBay, describing how he leverages density to support eBay's business of $62 billion in transactions of merchandise (Photo: Colleen Miller).

The infrastructure for eBay is enormous, and getting bigger by the moment. The giant Internet e-commerce company serves up 2 billion page views every day, requiring more than 75 billion daily requests to huge databases housing product information. That traffic is powered by high-density racks packed with up to to 96 servers and requiring 28 kilowatts of power. This Web-scale infrastructure enables eBay to process $62 billion in orders annually.

“We are our own little economy,” said Dean Nelson, the Senior Director of Global Foundation Services at eBay.

For that economy to prosper, the company’s data center infrastructure needs to become more efficient, even as it continues to scale up to handle more massive workloads – including a flood of new mobile traffic.

“It looks like we will be doubling our power costs in the next five years,” Nelson said Tuesday at the Google Data Center Efficiency Summit in Zurich, Switzerland. “The way we have done it in the past cannot be sustained and does not keep us competitive.”

Matching Redundancy and Applications

eBay’s goal is to match its data center infrastructure to the reliability needs of its applications. By engineering the company’s entire infrastructure to the highest levels of redundancy, eBay is among the many companies that have effectively overprovisioned their data centers. By building to a Tier IV standard – the highest level of reliability on the widely-used Uptime Institute tier system – eBay has relied on redundant power and cooling infrastructure that may not be needed.

Nelson said “right-sizing” eBay’s infrastructure and matching hardware redundancy to applications could yield lower capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses OpEx) going forward. That doesn’t mean fewer data centers, but gradually refining the existing footprint and implementing cutting-edge designs on new space.

“We had a great big Tier IV budget,” said Nelson. “But up to 80 percent of our equipment could live in Tier II. Search doesn’t need to be in Tier IV. We could cut our CapEx and OpEx in half when we right-size those operations.”

Mobile Transactions Accelerate
The payment processing service PayPal is growing 25 percent a year, Nelson said. But the fastest growth is coming from mobile transactions, which have quadrupled in the past two years and will hit $4 billion for 2011. Most of those transactions are coming via the eBay iPad app, Nelson said. “It’s changing the way people shop,” he said.

To support that growth, eBay has two basic configurations for its data center infrastructure:

• Clusters of servers running the Hadoop framework for data-intensive applications. These 48U racks use servers with the processors underclocked slightly (from 2.5 ghz to 1.6 ghz) to optimize for efficiency, but still use about 17 kilowatts of power per rack.
• An “everything else” configuration featuring 96 half-depth servers in a cabinet that runs at 28 kilowatts per rack.

“I love density,” says Nelson, who said that 28 kilowatts is about as far as eBay can push the density of its racks and still use air cooling. “Liquid cooling is what’s next,” he said. “The manufacturers have got to solve this (density) problem.”

Shift to Modular Design
That focus on density has led eBay to deploy a modular design in an 8,000 square foot data center that eBay is building in Phoenix, which will be able to accommodate up to 12 server-filled containers on its roof. The two-story building will also include raised-floor space on its first floor. The facility will use “hot water cooling” to support the requirement for year-round use of free cooling, despite the temperature in Phoenix, which routinely tops 100 degrees in the summer.

The new design was developed by the team of EDI, AHA Consulting Engineers and Winterstreet Architects, which prevailed in a design contest featuring public request for proposals (RFP) that was conducted through Data Center Pulse.

The RFP process is a key element of eBay’s process of right-sizing its infrastructure, built around a “holistic TCO model.” Nelson is looking to vendors for innovation to meet the requirements of comprehensive goal-based RFPs.

“When we put out a competitive RFP, that’s when we see the creative thinking (from vendors),” Nelson said. “It changes the buying decisions.”

eBay has some serious leverage with vendors. Nelson said the company will refresh 50 percent of its servers this year. That type of volume can prompt server makers to think outside the box – and outside previous warranty limits for operating ranges on temperature and humidity.

“The server manufacturers will warranty this equipment at higher temperatures,” said Nelson. “Push them on this. You can, and it works.”

The site in Phoenix where eBay is commencing construction on an 8,000 square foot data center. The company is seeking design submissions for a rooftop container installation.

The team of EDI, AHA Consulting Engineers and Winterstreet Architects has won a design contest to build a modular data center for eBay in Phoenix. The outcome of the unusual public request for proposals (RFP) was announced on Data Center Pulse by Dean Nelson, eBay’s Senior Director of Global Data Center Strategy.

The winning design from the EDI team will be used in an 8,000 square foot data center that eBay is building in Phoenix, which will be able to accommodate up to 12 server-filled containers on its roof. The two-story building will also include raised-floor space on its first floor. The EDI concept included “hot water cooling” to support the requirement for year-round use of fresh air cooling (free cooling), despite the temperatures in Phoenix.

“This has been an extremely interesting process for us with an unexpected result,” Nelson wrote. “EDI, a small company that we had never even heard of before, was able to meet all of the challenging requirements we had proposed to the industry through the Modular RFP process in a cost effective, simple design.”

The EDI team was among 20 entrants in the open RFP, which was designed to prompt innovation in data center design using modular data centers, which are typically built in a factory and assembled on-site, resulting in a faster and cheaper construction process.

Nelson said the RFP process generated a number of compelling designs. In addition to the EDI entry, Skanska put forth a design called eHive that Nelson described as “a very compelling ultra dense product.” Nelson said that although Skanska was not selected, “their modular product was innovative enough to warrant further consideration in this data center deployment.” The eHive product has not been released publicly, but Nelson said eBay would seek to integrate it into the EDI design concept.

The eBay project calls for a combination of approaches to cooling and reliability, using both air cooling and liquid cooling in different parts of the facility. The project is scheduled to be completed by summer 2011.

EDI Ltd. is based in Atlanta and has been known for its work with health care facility design. AHA Consulting Engineers is an MEP specialist that has partiucipated in data center projects for Cisco, Lucent, 3Com, Sun and Akamai. Winter Street Architects is based in Salem, Mass. and has worked on “Eco Data Center” designs for Sun Microsystems.

In this video, Nelson reviews the eBay RFP process with Mike Lewis, Director of Mission Critical Engineering and Gary Cudmore and Rob Nash-Boulden from EDI. This video runs about 14 minutes.

The new eBay data center in West Jordan, Utah, in the shadow of the Oquirrh Mountains.

eBay says its new “Topaz” data center in South Jordan, Utah has earned Gold-level certification under the LEED ( Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program for energy efficient buildings. The certification was the second LEED Gold data center award for eBay, which previously had one of its San Jose facilities earn that distinction, according to a blog post by Dean Nelson, eBay’s Senior Director of Global Data Center Strategy.

The $287 million Utah data center, which came online in May, will be the flagship facility for eBay, hosting the eBay.com and Paypal.com web sites. The first phase of the Topaz project is a 240,000 square foot building housing three 20,000 square foot data center halls – one for eBay Marketplace, one for PayPal.com, and a third hall for expansion space. The master plan for the site calls for four phases, which will allow eBay to consolidate leased data center space currently spread across three states. The facility has 7.2 megawatts of capacity in phase 1, with a 30 megawatt substation on site.

Here’s a look at some of the energy efficiency features built into the new facility:

• eBay is using 400V power distribution, allowing it to eliminate an entire level of transformers and deliver 230V to the servers, saving 2 percent in power costs.
• The data center is cooled using a water-side economizer system, which is supported by a 400,000 gallon cistern that collects rain water. eBay expects to use outside air to cool the data center for more than half the year.
• Inside the data center, eBay will use in-row cooling units for close-coupled cooling, and a hot air containment system to isolate the hot and cold air within the server area.
• eBay says it can support power densities of up to 30kw per rack using this design.

Nelson said he expects to achieve a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.4.

For more on adoption of LEED in the data center sector, see our Green Data Centers Channel and our feature on LEED Platinum Data Centers.

The site in Phoenix where eBay is commencing construction on an 8,000 square foot data center. The company is seeking design submissions for a rooftop container installation.

eBay plans to use data center containers at a new facility, and has issued a public request for proposals through the Data Center Pulse industry group. The winning design will be used in an 8,000 square foot data center that eBay is building in Phoenix, which will be able to accommodate up to 12 server-filled containers on its roof. The two-story building will also include raised-floor space on its first floor.  

eBay joins a growing number of companies using containers as the basis for a modular data center design. Google and Microsoft have both built container-based facilities, while i/o Data Centers just announced plans to install 200 modules in its Phoenix data center.

eBay is also building in Phoenix, where it already operates a major data center, and is seeking a design that will provide the highest possible density in a facility with 4 megawatts of power capacity. 

eBay’s plan was outlined by Dean Nelson, eBay’s Senior Director of Global Data Center Strategy, who is also a co-founder of Data Center Pulse. Eight companies have already been selected to compete for the job, all of which have industry experience including previous container-based projects. Nelson said at least 22 other submissions hjave met the criteria to be considered for the project. The RFP process closes on August 20.

“We knew this was going to be a challenging RFP because of the design requirements to accommodate current, emerging and future technologies in a highly flexible manner,” Nelson says. “In the past, specific vendors were selected to participate in Ebay RFPs. We believed that this approach could limit innovation.  It also excluded the companies that we are not aware of.”

The eBay project calls for a combination of approaches to cooling and reliability, using both air cooling and liquid cooling in different parts of the facility. Nelson said one goal of the design is to have containers that can use fresh air cooling (free cooling) year-round, despite the temperatures in Phoenix. For more details, see Nelson’s blog post and the RFP overview. Here’s a video in which Nelson outlines the project and discusses eBay’s design goals and process:

The new eBay data center in South Jordan, Utah, in the shadow of the Oquirrh Mountains.

How do you build a data center that will have $2,000 in transactions flowing through it every second?  That was the challenge for the eBay data center team in building the company’s new Topaz data center in South Jordan, Utah. The $287 million facility, which came online May 4, will be the flagship facility for eBay, hosting the eBay.com and Paypal.com web sites.

“We have built a fault tolerant Tier IV level data center that is 50 percent less expensive to operate than the average of all other data centers we lease today,” said Dean Nelson, eBay’s Senior Director of Global Data Center Strategy. “It is also 30 percent more efficient than the most efficient data center in our portfolio. At a designed PUE of 1.4, it lowers both our economical and ecological costs. We only consume the energy we need, when we need it.”

Dean has shared details and photos of the project – along with eBay’s high-spirited launch event – in a blog post at Data Center Pulse.

First of Four Phases
The first phase of the Topaz project is a 240,000 square foot building housing three 20,000 square foot data center halls – one for eBay Marketplace, one for PayPal.com, and a third hall for expansion space. The master plan for the site calls for four phases, which will allow eBay to consolidate leased data center space currently spread across three states. The facility has 7.2 megawatts of capacity in phase 1, with a 30 megawatt substation on site.

Here’s a look at some of the energy efficiency features built into the new facility:

• eBay is using 400V power distribution, allowing it to eliminate an entire level of transformers and deliver 230V to the servers, saving 2 percent in power costs.
• The data center is cooled using a water-side economizer system, which is supported by a 400,000 gallon cistern that collects rain water. eBay expects to use outside air to cool the data center for more than half the year.
• Inside the data center, eBay will use in-row cooling units for close-coupled cooling, and a hot air containment system to isolate the hot and cold air within the server area.
• eBay says it can support power densities of up to 30kw per rack using this design.

eBay anticipates gaining Gold-level certification for the Utah site under the LEED ( Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program for energy efficient buildings. Nelson said he expects to achieve a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.4.

Efficiency Meets Resiliency
“Now, I don’t want to go into the religious debate of who has the lowest PUE, but I do want to point one thing out,” Nelson writes. “In the business of on-line commerce, we do not have a choice but to build a highly available data center to support our customers. From my perspective, achieving a 1.4 PUE with a hard requirement to meet this level of redundancy is quite an accomplishment. The point is you can be resilient, efficient and cost effective if you set your mind to it from the beginning.”

The eBay team also knows how to throw a grand opening, converting the third data hall at the Topaz facility into “Club eBay” for an event featuring break dancers and a giant wall plug for “powering on” the facility. Here’s a look at the elegant setting, framed by overhead cable trays. See Dean Nelson’s blog post for the full story and more photos.

In other recent executive moves, Michael Manos moved from Microsoft to Digital Realty Trust, and Kevin Timmons shifted from Yahoo to Microsoft.

“I am very excited to help eBay achieve its vision of the future,” Dean writes. “I am absolutely on-board and ready to rumble.  I’m also excited about what this means for Data Center Pulse. We’re killing two birds with one stone here. The work that I am responsible for in eBay, is perfectly aligned with the industry efforts we are pushing for in DCP.  We will be accelerating our efforts and uniting end-users to drive innovation and direct the future of the datacenter market.”

Nelson’s departure also continues the brain drain at Sun, whose pending acquisition by Sun has been held up by a regulatory review by the European Commission.  

“When the official announcement came through that Oracle intended to purchase Sun, it caused many people to rethink their future,” Nelson wrties. “I have always believed that if I am challenged in my job, being stretched to continuously learn, have a solid team, executive support, and of course good compensation, there isn’t a reason to look for something else.  But with uncertainty, I also believed it was prudent to see what options were out there.”

The two projects have raised the profile of Utah as a destination for large data centers. As was the case with Oracle, eBay will take advantage of generous incentives from the local government. The state Office of Economic Development offered eBay $27.3 million in tax incentives over 10 years to build the facility in Utah, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

eBay (EBAY) was known to be focusing its data center search on the Southwest, including sites in Phoenix, Arizona and Utah. The facility, which could be as large as 250,000 square feet, would continue a regional expansion that has seen eBay acquire a large data center in Phoenix and expand its facility in Denver. The company is believed to have six data centers, including facilities in San Jose, Sacramento and Austin, Texas.

The data center is expected to create about 50 jobs with wages averaging $49,200 a year, about 50 percent above the Salt Lake County annual median wage. eBay said it chose Utah because it already had a relationship with the state through a call center it operates in the state.

Utah is not known for housing huge data centers, but has become home to a growing number of web hosts and enterprise data centers, including facilities for Center 7, ViaWest, WestHost and TierFour (UVNet) are among the companies that have built or acquired data centers in Utah in the past several years. A 2007 study by the Kauffman Foundation found that Utah led the nation in “economic dynamism” based on a strong concentration of fast-growing technology startups.

eBay last expanded its network in 2006, when it bought the former Switch-X data center in Phoenix for $16.3 million. The company cited the location’s low exposure to natural disasters as an important factor in its selection of the 135,000 square foot building. Utah also has a low probability of earthquakes and other disasters.