February 10, 2010 — IT hardware provider Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) announced on Wednesday it has opened a new 360,000-square-foot wind-cooled data center in Wynyard, UK, located approximately eight miles west of the North Sea.
The facility has a low-profile aesthetic, completely devoid of any branded logos and fenced off in an unassuming industrial park, as it is intended to store many companies’ valuable data.
The data center, which opened last weekend with its first customers in its fourth hall, will be used to compete with companies such as IBM for IT services and management contracts, a growing source of revenue that requires secure data centers.
According to Maurice Julian, UK facilities project director at HP, the facility is the company’s most energy efficient data center yet with a 1.2 PUE when the facility is operating at full capacity.
The hardware agnostic facility is designed to serve HP customers that are using the company’s IT services.
The half-built data center currently has four data halls, with another four data halls to built as needed.
HP originally acquired the data center from IT outsourcer Electronic Data Systems for $13.9 billion in May 2008.
HP installed eight 2.1-meter stainless steel and plastic intake fans to draw cool air. The air is distributed through a large bank of modular filters to remove dust and other contaminants, eventually making its way to the plenum area located below its data center halls.
The air is then distributed though the floors and moves across the front of server racks before being exhausted.
The data center also havests and filters rainwater, storing it in 80,000-liter tanks. In the event that the outside air is too dry, the filtered water is sprayed in a mist to increase the humidity before the air flows into the data halls.
Inside the data hall, HP has installed light-colored server racks, which allows the data halls to run on 40 percent less lighting than if the cabinets were painted black.
The facility has an uninterrupted power supply and up to 10 diesel generators supplied by four 85,000-liter underground fuel tanks, ensuring that it can continue to operate for up to four days in the event of a continuous power outage.
The data center has a range of security features, including the need for access cards and biometric details to access halls, locked server cabinets are locked, a limit of one person entering the data halls, and a high perimeter fence, reinforced walls and constant security.
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