Vodacom Opens Cape Town Data Centre
“As part of the journey to reduce our carbon footprint, one of the key design goals when building this data centre was to ensure energy efficiency, which will not only help reduce carbon emissions, but can result in cost reductions that can be passed on to our customers,” said Portia Maurice, Chief Officer of Corporate Affairs at Vodacom.
According to Vodacom their energy efficient design should have an energy saving of nearly R1 million.
The data centre is 7 storeys and covers over 1,500 sq m of data floor space which can be expanded to nearly 3,000 sq m as the need arises. The data centre is fully redundant with an N+N electrical configuration and fully redundant N+N high efficiency water cooled chiller plant.
“Since the establishment of our Business Services division just over three years ago, we are seeing business customers of all sizes demand more and more services to run and grow their organisations,” says Chris Ross, Managing Executive Commercial, Vodacom Group.
Scalable cloud computing plays a vital role in any modern data centre and Vodacom has partnered with VMware and Novell to give customers all the benefits of efficient and cost effective market-leading technology.
“Vodacom has reduced the space needed to host traditional servers in our data centre. We have also reduced power utilization to help reduce our carbon foot print. We will pass the benefits of cloud computing to our customers and enable a truly flexible, agile and scalable cloud service,” concluded Ross.
Some facts on the data centre:
• Total square meterage: Scalability of the data centre was a key design feature with the data floor area being able to expand from an initial 1,552sq m to an ultimate 2,862 sq m. All major building works and the envelope of the building have been completed in Phase I and further expansion can be easily introduced by fitting out of electrical and mechanical services as and when required.
• Energy facts: Cooling is provided by a water-cooled chiller plant selected primarily because of its energy efficiency. Low energy usage has been a key design goal: e.g. air-cooled step-down transformers with an efficiency of greater than 98%, distributing power at the highest possible voltage as close to the source as possible, selection of T5 technology lamps as well as LED lamps throughout the building, and lighting control which takes place through individual Lux and motion sensors being mounted to each fitting with a time delay to off.
• Use of service passages around the data centre floor areas which improves thermal insulation, reduces the risk of water entrance to critical data floor areas and improves physical security.
• Continuous cooling is provided for, mitigating the risk of overheating (thermal run-away) during utility grid power failures when the HVAC plant is starting up. The Data centre is protected with an environmentally friendly 200 Bar Inergen gas suppression system throughout.
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