MERIT TS is highly efficient and cloud-ready

MERIT Technology Solutions is proud to have unveiled its new high-density data centre in Midrand today.

Lex Pienaar, MERIT TS CEO, said: “The data centre that we've built is in compliance with all of the latest efficiency and redundancy requirements. A closed loop, cold aisle contained POD, close-coupled in-row coolers as well as highly efficient water chillers. We've also got UPS' that are 91%-97% efficient.

“In addition, we have a wide host of power and cooling redundancy measures that form part of the facility, and to round off the installation, we have instated cutting-edge environmental monitoring, fire protection and security measures. Furthermore, we use only next-generation 'green' power-optimised equipment in our set-up. We'd also like to highlight the fact that we've chosen the locale of this data centre to be at a central, convenient point for all major network providers - most of whom already congregate inside our meet-me room. All of this is confirmation of the fact that this new data centre is highly efficient and completely cloud-ready.

“It was essential for us to take the lead in the next-generation data centre deployment as the days of reliability being the primary rating consideration for data centres is now a thing of the past. Energy efficiency is rapidly becoming a key data centre concern, and PUE (power usage effectiveness) ratings will soon become the foremost consideration in the classification of data centres,” Pienaar said.

Pienaar noted that PUE is an international standard aimed at giving a definitive answer to the issue around energy efficiency within the data centre. It looks at how much power is committed to driving the actual IT/computing components within the data centre (servers and the like) in comparison to how much power is devoted to supplementary support components like lighting and cooling.

As the demands within the traditional computing and high-density computing environments are constantly on the increase, the power distribution that either metric expresses becomes vitally important. The PUE calculation is concerned with the relationship between Total Facility Power (TFP) and IT Equipment Power (IEP). “PUE can be calculated by dividing the amount of power entering a data centre by the power used to run the computer infrastructure within it. PUE is therefore expressed as a ratio, with overall efficiency improving as the quotient decreases toward one, which is, of course, the most desirable,” Pienaar clarified.

“When confronted with the prospect of building our own data centre, the anticipated escalated efficiency requirements for data centres was what prompted us to build a facility capable of catering for high-density technology, right from the outset,” he noted.

“This is the first in a series of highly-efficient data centres that we've got planned. The experience that we've gained from designing data centres for large corporations, combined with recent electricity price hikes and the myriad other problems associated with traditional data centre efficiencies, has both prompted and enabled us to incorporate all of the latest technologies into our own data centre,” Pienaar continued.

“Starting from scratch with this highly-efficient data centre was challenging and it took us longer than expected, requiring a larger budget than initially anticipated - but we are more than confident that with this particular design, the cost benefit of higher efficiency over the long-term will definitely be to our advantage, as businesses make the transition to this data centre for all of their private cloud computing requirements,” Pienaar concluded.