Data Centers
ADC data centers set the standard for next-generation facilities. Each site is painstakingly selected, designed and operated to ensure that it is robust, reliable, secure, energy efficient, and capable of supporting technological advances for years to come.
Beginning with site selection, great care is taken to choose sites with large amounts of reliable power available at the lowest possible cost, regional and environmental conditions that lack significant natural risks while capable of supporting the highest possible physical security, and that are located in areas with significant network diversity.
Emphasizing robust power, cooling and network connectivity, our data centers are designed to support reliability of greater than 99.9999%. Each location is capable of being operated as a Tier III or Tier IV environment, offering our clients the highest industry standards in redundancy and reliability.
Site Selection
Site selection is paramount in establishing a location to house critical infrastructure. The ever-growing electrical and cooling requirements of data center equipment mandate that vast amounts of power be available. In determining the suitability of a site, we work closely with local utilities to guarantee the availability of a minimum power density of 200 watts per square foot of critical power plus the additional power required for the non-critical loads. In addition, we do everything possible to purchase power from multiple utility substations, often purchasing high-voltage line power and installing our own on-site substations.
Reliability is always the first criteria we evaluate, and as a result we carefully select sites in geographic locations that are not located in areas of known environmental risks such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods. While choosing locations where such events are extremely rare, we go even further by requiring that our buildings be structurally designed well beyond the building code, as "essential facilities" with a Structural Importance Factor of 1.5. And, each of our facilities incorporates a lightning protection grid to further reduce the likelihood of any interference from natural occurrences.
Additional consideration is given to the physical security of the site and every effort is made to choose sites that provide appropriate buffer zones to further protect our buildings.
Network availability is a fundamental criterion for site selection. The availability of multiple carriers with robust bandwidth and product options is critical to our clients and pivotal in our site choices.
Power
More than any other element, the design of the power system in our data centers is given the greatest emphasis. The goal of highly reliable, high quality power capable of automatically withstanding interruptions in the utility supply is the most important component in our data center designs.
To accomplish this, ADC utilizes the industry's latest in uninterruptible power supply (UPS) technology with redundancy all the way down to the component level, ensuring that there are no single points of failure.
Additional effort is made to ensure that these complex systems are simplified to help eliminate operational errors. The use of key interlocks to prevent out-of-sequence load transfers, and mimic panels to guide technicians through operational steps are utilized at every level of the design.
Maintainability is also crucial to the design of critical environments and great effort is made to ensure that every component from the UPS to the breakers can be isolated and maintained without placing the facility in jeopardy. Liberal use of maintenance bypass devices, draw-out breakers, and panel boards that can be opened for inspection and re-torque are just a few examples of the components that we include to ensure that everything in the electrical system can undergo critical routine maintenance.
Cooling
The IT industry's constant efforts to put more processing power in less physical space, while increasing the equipment clock-speeds at exponential rates, have placed growing emphasis on the importance of the availability of uninterruptible cooling. With temperatures approaching nuclear levels on the chips and multiple chips arranged in boxes that are immediately next to one another, the old "ride-through" time required to restart chiller plants in no longer acceptable.
Recognizing this, ADC data center cooling systems are designed with the same emphasis on availability as our electrical systems. Utilizing a variety of options such as thermal storage, separate UPS systems, and heat exchangers, alternative cooling systems are introduced into each of our designs to ensure that adequate cooling remains available during power interruptions of our primary chiller plants.
The industry has realized for years that the traditional "raised floor" delivery of air to cool the IT equipment is quickly reaching its theoretical limits. For this reason, ADC has adopted new innovations in data center cooling.
Utilizing "hot-aisle, cold-aisle" layout, we combine an enclosed, pressurized cold aisle and a ducted hot aisle to ensure even distribution of cold air throughout the data center space. This eliminates both the temperature stratification that is inherent in the raised floor delivery system, as well as the migration of hot air back into the cold aisle, which is often responsible for temperature-related failures and a reduction in the operational life expectancy of the equipment located in the upper tiers of the cabinets.
Liquid Cooled Capable
Although the pressurized cold aisle approach has been modeled to cool up to 1000 watts per square foot, the quantity of air required and the ride-through requirements are so extreme that it would be unrealistic to expect air cooling to be feasible. Therefore, ADC has taken yet another step to provide cooling as even higher loads become a reality.
Included in every data center is the ability to easily retrofit the variety of liquid-cooled solutions being offered, including water cooling. Each of our sites has been designed to include space specifically configured to host these solutions with a minimum of effort. And, included in our plan are provisions to protect all of the equipment, whether air- or liquid-cooled, with sophisticated leak detection and integrated drainage systems.
Energy Efficiency and "Green" Design
Rapidly increasing public awareness of the human-related impact on our natural environment has stimulated an avalanche of corporate interest in responsible use of our resources and energy. ADC recognizes that data centers are utilizing a growing percentage of the total electrical energy consumed, currently estimated to be 2% of the total energy in the U.S alone.
For this reason, we have dedicated significant resources and design effort to ensure that we design and operate our centers in a responsible manner, maximizing the productivity of every watt of power we use, and utilizing construction methods and materials that minimize our environmental impact.
As a baseline, we are utilizing the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards as a template. We then look at all of our resource utilization and seek solutions to further reduce our impact. The McClellan facility is the industry’s first and only LEED Platinum pre-certified data center.
A good example might be water usage in our cooling towers at the McClellan, California site. In an effort to locate a suitable redundant source of water for the towers, we discovered a gray-water well close to our site. We elected to filter that water and utilize it as a primary source, while using the local water district's domestic water source as a failover. However, still not satisfied we had done enough to reduce our impact we elected to introduce another filter system to remove the dissolved solids in the cooling tower blow-down enabling us to reuse that water in the towers. This resulted in a significant reduction in our annual water use and eliminated the impact of the blow-down on the sanitary sewer.
Security
Data Centers have now become a crucial component of our global economy. Recognizing that transactions of billions of dollars transit these facilities on a daily basis has placed a renewed emphasis on physical security.
ADC has adopted industry-leading security standards. Utilizing multi-level security zones with perimeter fencing, man-traps, heat and motion sensors, and liberal video surveillance; eliminating vehicle access to the outside walls of our facilities; and employing the latest in biometric access control and digital recording technology are just a few of the considerations that we have given to the physical security of our sites.
