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With the green shift in effect and on-going growth of global connectivity, IBM will be launching the largest, energy-efficient data center infrastructure facility in Kelowna Canada called gigaCENTER. In partnership with Rack Force a 150,000 square foot data center costing $100 million will operate on hydro power from the Columbia River.

Kelowna is considered a safe haven for data-center and according to CBNA Geologic surveys indicate that the Okanagan is at least 150 miles from the nearest earthquake zone. Climate experts also have said that the region’s location in the high desert makes it safe from other disasters such as floods, tornadoes and major storms.

The GigaCENTER will be able to accommodate power loads of up to 700 watts per square foot, according to CIO, which describes Kelowna as “the best place to build a data center in North America”. Rack Force a major player in virtual hosting, uses Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager to streamlines the management of its virtual machines developed through Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

Backbone magazine goes in details about the environmentally friendly built datacenter. In the article by Danny Bradbury says “The company included a range of innovations in the data centre’s construction, including reducing the length of high voltage cables to increase efficiency, and placing uninterruptible power supplies directly in the rack instead of in more centralized locations.

Those racks of servers were also turned sideways, so that cooling air passed over a shorter distance from side to side rather than from front to back, which made the cooling process more efficient. Variable speed motors were put on all of the air pumps to avoid expending too much energy on pumping when it wasn’t necessary, and the company also relied heavily on cold-aisle containment.

Perhaps one of the most significant parts of the data centre’s operation is the source of that cool air. Instead of relying entirely on energy-intensive air conditioning systems, the facility will use external air as much as possible. Cold air is drawn from the outside of the building and removes heat from inside the facility via heat exchangers. Thanks to Canada’s cooler climate, RackForce believes it can use this technique, known as free-air cooling, for seven or eight months of the year.

Canada’s cooler climate isn’t the only thing that makes it an attractive site for data centres. Fry said its abundant water supply and hydroelectric energy make certain parts of the country much more environmentally friendly sources of energy in terms of carbon emissions.
The first phase of the data centre won’t be completed until December, but IBM has already crunched the numbers to come up with an efficiency rating. It uses the power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating from the Green Grid consortium, which measures the ratio between the energy needed for the data centre and the energy used to run the equipment within it.

The data centre will have a PUE rating of 1.38, meaning that the facility will need 1.38 watts of electricity for every watt used to power the IT equipment. The ideal is a PUE rating of 1.0, although this is impossible to attain in real-world conditions. “