Arizona-based i/o Data Centers' new data center and corporate headquarters, Phoenix ONE, incorporates such technologies as plug fans, ultra-sonic humidification, and its new sealed cabinet design, ThermoCabinet.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In addition to being one of the largest commercially available data centers in North America, IT infrastructure solutions provider i/o Data Centers (www.iodatacenters.com) intends for its newly opened Phoenix ONE facility to also be the most innovative with the introduction of a patent-pending server enclosure called the ThermoCabinet.
Drawing cool, pressurized air up from the raised floor through the closed cabinet, ThermoCabinet enables users to pack as many as 10 times as much equipment compared to traditional data centers. The ThermoCabinet also employs a power delivery system called ThermoPower, allowing for greater server density and power capacity, which is scalable from 8 to 32 KW of usable power, featuring power density of as much as 2,500 watts per square foot.
“We’re employing technologies like plug fans, ultra-sonic humidification, thermal storage, sealed cabinets,” i/o Data Centers president Tony Wanger said. “We’ve been doing vented and chimney cabinets for years, and this is the next iteration — to actually have that chimney as a draw or a vacuum as opposed to simply just as chute… There are two ways to look at it — it’s either an over-grown sealed cabinet, or it’s a smaller unit-sized container — a containerized data center is what it is.”
The sealed cabinet, he said, draws cold air from the pressurized 3-foot raised floor and the hot air is pulled out using a separate system, providing optimized thermal efficiency. “By situating the ThermoCabinet directly on the raised floor grid, what we’ve done is extend that pressurized plenum with all the cold air up into the fronts of the cabinets,” Wanger said. “The cold air fills up the front of the cabinet from the bottom… so we’re pushing cold air into the front end and the servers themselves are drawing cold air whether through their fans on or some clients turn them off and use the natural conduction process, and then at the back, we’re sucking the hot air out of that sealed cabinet.”
At 538,000 square-feet, the added capacity means the Phoenix ONE data center’s roomy presence is in-effect even greater as users are able to pack 5,000 square feet worth of data center equipment into a couple of cabinets.
The locking ThermoCabinet also has no perforations, providing an additional layer of physical protection at the Phoenix ONE data center in addition to its multi-layered access control approach, which includes on-site security staff, biometric screening, mantraps and Closed Circuit TV surveillance.
Wanger said the ThermoCabinet is the result of i/o Data Centers’ focus on research and development, which Google and Microsoft have embraced more than others in the collocation and hosting industry that tend to retrofit old data centers or have plain, vanilla data center built for them. “We believe we’re one of the only folks in the country doing [innovation],” Wanger said.
