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M. Periasamy

Kept cool all the time, much like the data centre’s energy machines.

Shamik Paul Recently in Singapore

As the bus ferrying eight eager journalists came to a gradual halt before a nondescript building that could resemble any of the several smaller IT offices in India, a sense of disappointment was palpable.

An evening drink and a lunch with data centre services provider Equinix Inc had created many fancy notions of how a data centre should look and feel.

“The building houses other offices as well,” a fellow journalist remarked while entering the air-conditioned lobby that provided instant respite from Singapore’s sultry tropical heat. Probably, the non-disclosure agreement requesting journalist to abstain from disclosing the whereabouts of Equinix’s second data centre in Singapore had given rise to expectations of greater secrecy.

The lobby or the customer area was a neat affair, done up in the corporate colours of red and black. Here the group was divided into smaller teams and the tour of one of Asia’s largest data centres began.

For an IT reporter, hearing about data centres is nothing new. He would have attended endless press conferences where companies would have put their best foot forward to convince the media about the uniqueness of their storage or networking or server products. But to be present in a data centre was quite a different experience. It was like being in a place that feels familiar though you have never set your foot in there before.

And so you keep looking at things, all the while comparing your imagination of a data centre with the reality.

Singapore-2 International Business Exchange (that’s how Equinix calls its new data centre), which became operational at the beginning of this month, saw an investment of $45 million and would add 700 cabinets to the company’s capacity in Singapore. After the completion of the second phase that is in the design stage, the centre will have a capacity of 1,700 cabinets.

After walking over sticky mats to ensure our shoes were dust-free, we entered a long, narrow, white-washed corridor. The first stop was at a small window that opened on to the cooling chamber.

As I stared at the giant water-cooled system used to cool the equipment at the centre, the familiar jargon about how companies are trying to make their products energy efficient to minimise energy consumption and cooling requirements suddenly made more sense. “The ambient temperature within the technical areas is maintained at 22, plus or minus 3°C,” the company said.

The next stop was outside the generator room, which contained a 6 x2000 kVA diesel-engine power generator. This is the standby power supply. Later, when a company spokesperson said one of the main concerns regarding setting up a data centre in India was the unavailability of uninterrupted power supply in many areas, it did not seem exaggerated at all. Imagine all the diesel you would need to run this generator for two hours everyday.

The final destination was one of the large rooms where the storage equipment were housed. Some of the stacks were already in place. In between the stacks were long furrows on the floor, which would remind you of the trenches of World War I. Only, these were much narrower and probably less deep. And, definitely, it served a different purpose.

These furrows are the lifeline of the cooling system of the centre. Under the floor runs pipelines that bring cold air, which is released through these furrows. (By the way, the floor we were standing on was artificial. It was a raised platform to make way for all the cables and pipelines underneath.) The furrows are also the gateway for data transfer.

The devices housed in the centre are connected to the world outside through cables that pass through the furrows.

The tour now came to end, leaving us with a lot of interesting insight.

shamik@thehindu.co.in

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