Brocade's new data center and engineering labs at its new San Jose headquarters.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Technology provider Brocade (www.brocade.com) announced on Thursday it has opened a new data center and engineering labs in a 75,000-square-foot space at its new San Jose headquarters.
The move comes a couple months after Brocade introduced its converged fabric-based solutions which optimize data center networks to support virtual servers, applications and data.
The new facility incorporates key elements of flexibility, energy efficiency, sustainable design and technology innovation, says the company.
Constructing the new campus allowed Brocade to design its engineering labs and data center to the highest standards and best practices, from the ground up.
The company collapsed the access and aggregation networking layers for a flat Layer 2 network, which provided more available bandwidth and simplified operations.
Brocade consolidated three San Jose-area data centers into one 5,000-square-foot facility, allowing it to reduce its physical footprint requirement by 30 percent and its data center energy consumption by 37 percent.
The consolidation process will eliminate 4,450 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year for Brocade.
Additionally, the company was able to decommission about 133kW worth of equipment, translating to $200,000 in yearly savings.
In a blog post, Brocade VP of IT and CIO Tim Graumann discussed the process of building the data center and R&D facility where he offers key specs and other details.
The technology provider increased the electrical density of its racks by 21 percent by using more rack unit space and designing new rack elevations, boosted its vertical space by 12 percent with its flat floor lab, consolidated five R&D engineering lab locations into one R&D Lab, and introduced an extremely capable, highly-available yet simple network based on Brocade NetIron MLX technology.
“Brocade’s new cutting-edge data center incorporates design features that are directly linked to our Brocade One vision — unmatched simplicity, investment protection, non-stop networking and optimized applications,” says Michael Hirahara, vice president of global real estate, facilities and services at Brocade. “Our data center and R&D lab go beyond just being functional spaces. They are a testament to Brocade’s technological expertise, corporate vision and core values.”
The new data center also includes many advanced design features that optimize energy efficiency, including hot-row/cold-row configuration and hot-row containment, custom-designed, energy-efficient in-row cooling units with built-in fan redundancy, fully automated controls at the POD level with energy monitoring capabilities, energy-efficient chillers and cooling towers, and high-efficiency motors with variable frequency drives.
Additional features include occupancy-sensing lighting controls, an early warning smoke detection system, and a fire suppression using dry pipe and dry agent to protect equipment.
With these features in place, Brocade now has a calculated Power Usage Effectiveness metric of 1.3, while comparable data centers of the same size typically have a PUE greater than 1.5.
Brocade has posted a video tour of the new data center on its blog, narrated by Brocade VP of global real estate, facilities and services Michael Hirahara.
