SA's biggest mobile operator, Vodacom, opened a seven-storey, energy-efficient data centre in Foreshore, Cape Town, yesterday.
The operator says the new centre has more than 1 500 square metres of data floor space, expandable to nearly 3 000 square metres.
It adds that it has fully redundant electrical N+N configuration, and in some cases even higher redundancy.
“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,” says Portia Maurice, chief officer of corporate affairs at Vodacom.
Cooling is provided by a water-cooled chiller plant, selected primarily because of its energy-efficiency.
Other green aspects include 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.
It adds that 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.”
Vodacom also says energy-efficient designs will see annual energy savings of nearly R1 million.
Cloud preparation
The operator says the data centre was built to prepare for the expansion of cloud computing, which is already gaining traction in SA.
“Virtualisation, hosted services such as hosted call centres, telepresence, and increased acceptance of convergence have all been major factors in the investment in our new data centres... bringing the Foreshore data centre online is an integral link in those capabilities,” says managing executive commercial at the Vodacom Group Chris Ross.
Scalable cloud computing plays a vital role in any modern data centre, and Vodacom has partnered with VMware and Novell to provide this to customers.
Carbon cut
In June, Vodacom said it plans to build one of Africa's greenest buildings to house an innovation team focused on developing an alternative energy solution.
The joint initiative with parent company Vodafone will see locally-developed solutions being shared across Vodafone's global markets, to help reduce its carbon emissions worldwide.
Planned for completion in the third quarter of this year, the green innovation centre will see suppliers and experts from various fields tasked with developing energy-efficient technology. The centre, which will cost in the region of R24 million, is based at the company's head office, in Midrand.
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