Finland's CSC — IT Center for Science Ltd. (CSC) has selected SGI® ICE Cube® modular data center technology for a new green data center in Kajaani, Northern Finland. Valued at €2.6 million, the three year deal will see a brownfield site transformed to meet CSC's expanding demand for HPC capacity.
"The SGI modular data center will serve as the foundation of CSC future growth in HPC and ICT services and is the culmination of several years of planning. The level of flexibility provided by the SGI solution really helps us adapt to changing demand," says Tero Tuononen director of ICT Platforms for CSC.
CSC was looking for a cost-effective, future proof and scalable data center. They selected SGI ICE Cube Air based on a detailed analysis of functionality and total costs over a ten-year period. As part of their criteria, CSC was aiming for annual power usage effectiveness (PUE) of less than 1.2 for its full data center infrastructure. The SGI ICE Cube Air can deliver a pPUE (partial PUE) of 1.08 or less. This efficiency is achieved using direct air free cooling taking advantage of the cool Northern climate. In fact, SGI has developed an extreme weather version of the ICE Cube Air for the Kajaani climate where the winter temperature can be as low as -45C, which can present problems for conventional free air-cooling systems.
The new data center's sustainability is further enhanced by its reuse of a disused paper warehouse in the Renforsin Ranta business park, a former paper mill location ideally suited to modular data center technology.
Installation and commissioning is scheduled for completion in autumn 2012. Future HPC systems will be placed in Kajaani and the site will also provide low cost hosting for CSCs growing cloud and managed services portfolio.
"We are delighted to be supporting CSC's Kajaani project, their innovative approach is exploiting the best of technology and local resources to rapidly deliver a first class HPC facility in a more sustainable way," said Rod Evans, VP for EMEA at SGI.
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Tags: Design & Facilities Management, Power & Cooling |
