Ready to Super-Size the Enterprise

A view from the catwalk of the first phase of the massive Phoenix ONE data center, which features a 34-foot ceiling and raised mezzanine for infrastructure.

PHOENIX - The sign above the entrance to the raised-floor area at the Phoenix ONE data center makes a bold declaration in capital letters: “NOT ALL DATA CENTERS ARE CREATED EQUAL.” That’s the corporate motto for i/o Data Centers, and Phoenix ONE is the company’s effort to put an exclamation mark on it.

At 538,000 square feet, the mammoth Phoenix ONE site is one of the world’s largest data centers. The facility opened for business this month, less than six months after i/o Data Centers took ownership of the property, and several substantial customers have already been installed in the first phase, which features 180,000 square feet of raised floor.

But it’s not only the scope of the facility that makes Phoenix ONE distinctive. The huge data center features a number of design innovations:

• A high-density cabinet that can support computing power loads of up to 32 kilowatts per rack (2,500 watts per square foot). The patent-pending ThermoCabinet is sealed for complete isolation of hot and cold air. Cool air movies directly from the raised floor into a chamber in the front of the cabinet, through the servers and then exits through a hot air chimney at the rear of the cabinet.
• A custom ThermoPower strip offering a range of power options for customer cabinets.    
• A thermal storage system that will allow i/o Data Centers to run chillers for its cooling systems at night, when power rates are lower, and then store cold water for use during daylight hours.  
• An enormous rooftop array of solar panels, which will eventually generate as much as 4.5 megawatts of power for the data center - nearly three times the capacity of Google’s rooftop solar array at its California headquarters.
• A variety of energy efficiency features, including low-power LED lighting on the data center floor, ultrasonic humidifiers for climate control, highly efficiency computer room air handlers (CRAHs) using plug fans,  high-efficiency chillers, and perimeter flooring made from reccycled car tires.   

i/o Data Centers says it expects the Phoenix ONE facility to be certified under the LEED ( Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).  

Inside the Phoenix ONE Data Center

The Phoenix ONE facility is like a data center, only bigger. The new flagship colocation center for i/o Data Centers takes many aspects of data center operations and extends them, whether in the vast expanses of raised-floor hosting space or the industrial-strength power and cooling plants. Our photo gallery offers a closer look at Phoenix ONE and its infrastructure.

Solar Power at Data Center Scale

Solar power has finally reached data center scale. Phoenix IT infrastructure provider i/o Data Centers is installing a huge array of solar panels on the 11-acre roof of its new Phoenix ONE data center. The company says the photovoltaic panels will generate up to 4.5 megawatts of power to supplement the energy needs of the massive facility.

The installation planned for Phoenix ONE will dwarf all previous efforts to integrate solar power into a working data center. Its output will be nearly three times the 1.6 megawatts produced by the solar panels covering the roof of the Googleplex.

The first phase of 5,000 solar panels in Phoenix is scheduled to be operational in January, and will generate 500 kilowatt-peak (kWp), the company says. The array will be expanded in four additional phases during 2010 to reach a total capacity of 4.5 megawatts-peak.

That’s just a fraction of the 80 megawatts of power capacity that the 538,000 square foot Phoenix ONE data center will need upon completion. The solar power is also expensive, costing about 18 cents per kilowatt hour to generate in a market where grid power is 7 cents.  

Time-Shifted Cooling
But Phoenix ONE plan capitalizes on another wrinkle in power pricing: the differential between the daytime and overnight rates. The solar plant will be combined with an on-site thermal storage facility to create a time-shifted energy efficiency system.

i/o Data Centers will run its chillers at night when power is cheap, and then tap the thermal storage “battery” to provide much of the facility’s cooling during the day, reducing its power usage when electricity is most expensive. The solar power panels will further lower Phoenix ONE’s reliance on utility power during peak hours.         

“If we can generate 3 megawatts during the day, combined with our thermal storage, we can shave our power costs by about 50 percent,” said George Slessman, the CEO of i/o Data Centers. “Anything I can do to move my power consumption to off-peak hours is going to save a lot of money. Solar is the renewable approach that works best during peak daytime power pricing.”

Combining Colocation and Containers

Colocation and data center services provider i/o Data Centers has deployed an SGI ICE Cube data center at Phoenix ONE facility, the companies said this week. The 538,000 square foot Phoenix ONE project doesn’t officially open until next month, but i/o Data Centers is beginning some customer installations. 

i/o Data Centers joins a short list of providers of colocation providers who offer infrastructure support for data center containers, and is the first to spotlight SGI, the server vendor previously known as Rackable Systems. CRG West is partnering with HP and Verari Systems to offer hosting for their data center containers.

Combining containers and colocation can provide rapid expansion for companies that need to expand their data centers but are out of power or cooling capacity at their existing facilities. Containers can live outside but still require an external source of power and security.  i/o Data Centers supplies a secure infrastructure for the ICE Cube that includes conditioned power, temperature-controlled space and network connectivity.

The World’s Largest Raised Floor?

The new Phoenix ONE data center will have 460,000 square feet of raised floor.

As a leading vendor of tiles for raised floors, Tate has helped customers install more than 450 million square feet of its products. But i/o Data Centers’ new Phoenix ONE data center will be its largest installation project ever in a single data center facility, with a raised-floor area spanning more than 460,000 square feet.

The massive project will be completed in three phases, with the first 180,000 square feet scheduled for completion by June 1. This will be followed by a second and third phases of 180,000 and 100,000 square feet, respectively.

“We are fortunate to be profitable, well-capitalized and growing despite the economy,” said Anthony Wanger, president and founder of i/o Data Centers. “There was no question that we would incorporate raised flooring into our Phoenix ONE data center and we knew that industry-leader Tate was the right choice for a project of this magnitude.”

Internap Names New President and CEO

Internap Network Services (INAP) has made a leadership change, hiring digital video veteran Eric Cooney as president and chief executive officer. Cooney will take over on March 16, replacing James DeBlasio, who has resigned but will continue his duties until Cooney arrives. DeBlasio had been president and CEO of Internap since 2005.

Cooney was most recently president and chief executive officer of Tandberg Television, part of the Ericsson Group. Internap board chairman Gene Eidenberg cited Cooney’s experience in the technology industry and “proven track record of increasing shareholder value.”

“His leadership and management skills, combined with his hands-on operational experience in a publicly traded company, are the ideal combination to improve shareholder value and restore investor confidence at Internap,” said Eidenberg.

That confidence has been battered over the past year after Internap botched the integration of the former VitalStream content delivery network, which it purchased in 2007 for $217 million. In March 2008 the company lowered its revenue guidance to reflect the impact of outages on the VitalStream network. In October Internap took a $100 million charge to reflect the decreased value of its CDN business.

i/o Data Centers Expands With Phoenix Site

i/o Data Centers has purchased this 530,000 square foot building in Phoenix.

i/o Data Centers has leased a huge, power-rich industrial building in Phoenix and plans to convert the facility into a data center, the company said today. At a time when data center construction has been sharply curtailed by the credit crisis, i/o Data Centers said its “Phoenix ONE” project is fully funded following a $56 million equity investment last month by Sterling Partners.

The 530,000 square foot facility near Sky Harbor Airport was built in 2005 to house the bottling operations of LeNature’s Beverages, which never fully occupied the building before filing for bankruptcy. i/o Data Centers has signed a 20-year lease with landlord CBRE Investors, and plans to use the site as both a data center and its corporate headquarters.

The 31-acre campus currently has 40 megawatts of power and an on-site substation, and i/o Data Centers says it will eventually expand capacity to 120 megawatts. Six fiber providers have committed to providing connectivity for the building, which is adjacent to a major fiber trench. 

“Our customers need scalable power and space to support their IT operations, and we help them do it in a capital-efficient way,” said i/o Data Centers’ President, Anthony Wanger. “Even though the economy is slow, the demand for high quality data center power has continued to be strong. Our customers need to grow their IT operations and we help them do it. We have constructed a well-capitalized, profitable business and will continue to grow with our new and current client base.”

Capital Strength a Priority for i/o Data Centers

The way Tony Wanger sees it, financial strength is part of data center reliability, and capital can become a single point of failure. 

Wanger, the co-founder and President of i/o Data Centers, says the company’s investor relationships and approach to capital management have paid off, positioning it to plan new data center projects while other companies are reining in their expansion ambitions.

i/o Data Centers announced yesterday that it has received $56 million in equity financing from Sterling Partners. ”Some of the key folks at Sterling know us very well, and know our track record,” said Wanger. “We’ve had a very good fall, and we need to expand. We are firing on all cylinders. ”

The company is nearing capacity on its first project, a 125,000 square foot data center in Scottsdale, Arizona. Wanger said that i/o is planning a second facility in the Phoenix area, and looking for expansion opportunities in several new markets.