March 2018, Rotterdam - The Netherlands
In recent months Schneider Electric and Elektro Internationaal (EI) have been building a second powerhouse in the monumental Van Nelle coffee factory in Rotterdam. The powerhouse is the electrical installation that exists of, among other things, transformers, emergency power batteries and generators that ensure that the IT equipment in the datacenter will never be without power.
Within the walls of the SmartDC datacenter in Rotterdam are tens of thousands of servers from companies and institutions that want to be ensured constant uptime. Managing director Richard Boogaard explains: ’Nowadays companies want to have the greatest possible certainty that their equipment is always online. A malfunction in the datacenter could result in hundreds of thousands of businesses and shops in Europe being left without internet or telephone, with all the consequences.’
He continues: ”It is not only about major economic damage, but there are also risks in the field of safety. For example, train and shipping traffic is also controlled via online applications and complicated switching technology is often controlled via equipment in a datacenter. Some companies even choose to run their equipment in two datacenters at the same time as a precaution. That is why SmartDC has built a second datacenter in the south of the Netherlands, far above sea level. ’
In the window
The powerhouse at SmartDC was a special project for Elektro Internationaal, says project leader Vincent Bogaard: ’The SmartDC building alone is special: the monumental Van Nelle factory, one of the 9 UNESCO monuments in the Netherlands. But what makes this project even more special is that our panels have been given a beautiful place in the datacenter. Often technical installations are concealed in the basement, but SmartDC has installed a meter-long glass wall in front of the powerhouse. Our panels are thus on display, as it were, in the window.’
SmartDC also has several meeting and server rooms with glass walls within the Rotterdam datacenter, completely in the original style of the Van Nelle factory.
Never without power
The datacenter already contained a complete double emergency power system, consisting of 4 generators, a 2 MVA transformer and 4 Uninterrupted Power Supplies (UPSs) that ensure that the power to the datacenter is never interrupted. If the main power fails, the UPS batteries supply power for the first few minutes, then the supply is taken over by the generator cluster. These generators are linked to a large diesel tank, with sufficient stock to keep the datacenter running 3 days. In addition, SmartDC has concluded contracts in which it has been agreed that the diesel tank will be refueled within 4 hours.
Expansion
To guarantee even more security, SmartDC has invested in a second powerhouse. In technical terms this is called ’redundant’. Richard Boogaard explains: ’In a datacenter it is important that there are as few Single Points of Failure as possible. All important parts of the datacenter are doubled, so that in the event of a malfunction there is no impact on the equipment of our customers. ’
’With the second emergency power installation, we offer our customers even more security and we can serve our customers at the highest possible level when it comes to datacenter design.’
(*images: Claire Droppert)
