Clearstream Church Village Data Centre
The Church Village Centre is a 7000sq/ft high-security building set in a secure 1 acre site. The site has previously been home to a Western Power Electricity Sub-Station/Control Centre, and then the South Wales Ambulance Control Centre.
The Centre's reinforced concrete structure was purpose-built to withstand explosions and fire, with steel reinforced 10” concrete walls and secure underground computer hosting rooms.Its previous purpose has ensured that the site is ideally provided with an excellent communications infrastructure, plus secure on-site power transformers all creating an ideal environment for Cloud Services and Server Co-Location. The local area electrical power grid runs beneath the site, providing excellent power security and potential for further expansion.
An 18 month fit-out has added a 0.5 Mega-Watt generator, N+1 redundant UPS protection, and resilient multiple carrier Gigabit Internet feeds direct to the main South West BT Metronode Exchange at Cardiff Millenium Stadium.
The external security doors are reinforced high-security steel with swipe-card access, and the site has 24x7 alarm and fire detection and monitoring, with security camera protection. Dual perimeter fences with electric steel gates control access to the site, with additional high-security fencing around the essential services plant. Office windows are also protected by 1" steel bars to maximise security, and hosting rooms have 10" steel-mesh reinforced concrete walls in addition to their underground location.
The power infrastructure supports up to 32A per 42U rack, supported by N + 1 UPS with 30 minute autonomy, and generator backup with automatic mains detection giving full power protection within one minute. Some of the unique site features are described below;
Welcome to Church Village
Electric Steel Gates control pedestrian and Vehicle access to our secure 1 acre site.
The Church Village Centre is no converted warehouse or office building, but a purpose-built, reinforced concrete, underground secure facility.
Secure Electricity Grid
The local power grid has multiple transformers, physically located within our Church Village site perimiter fencing. Multiple 1100KVa bearers traverse the site supporting both the local area and providing secure grid supply to the Church Village Centre.
Generator Protection
Full power autonomy for Phase 1 is provided by a 0.5Mw diesel generator with secure on-site diesel supplies. Automatic sensing of a failure in the power grid provides backup power within one minute to all systems, including cooling and office facilities. Phase 2 underway adds a further N + 1 generator.
High Capacity Electric Power Systems
MerlinGuring High capacity power switching with automatic generator failover and the latest Powerwave 9000 N + 1 UPS systems protect your systems and data. With 30 minute battery autonomy the UPS systems provide fully conditioned power with > 95% efficiency.
Investment in the latest technology provides excellent efficiency, achieving class-leading green energy performance whilst minimising carbon footprint, all together this provides high levels of power security.
Originally installed when the centre operated as a Power Sub-Station and Control Centre, our power switching room has been fully up-rated during 2011 to support hosted IT systsems, and has been carefully designed for reliable, continuous operation for years to come.
Server Rooms
Our Phase 1 server rooms are located securely below ground and use leading Minkel secure 42" racks with dual PDU's per rack and full CAT6 network patching. All cabinets lock individually. Warm-isle cooling provides an automatically controlled emvironment even for the high power loadings with a class-leading PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of below 1.4. This rating compares well with many typical Data Centres having PUE's of 2 or higher.(1=100% efficiency, 2=50% efficiency etc).
Input from the Carbon Trust on how to minimise our carbon emissions and power costs were held early in the Centre's planning, and greatly influenced our design and choice of equipment. We offer our customers peace of mind that their computing carbon emissions are amongst the lowest possible in the UK.
Full VESA smoke detection systems operate in each room, with individual rack based fire suppression.
Environmental Controls
Air temperature and particulates are controlled by state-of-the-art EcoFlow Evaporative Cooling technology. In conjunction with a warm-isle design for server racks, this provides one of the most power efficient and environmentally friendly solutions for large-scale system cooling.
Evaporative cooling uses a fraction of the power of traditional CRAC refrigeration units, and requires no ozone-layer harming refrigeration gases in construction or maintenance.
The cooling system is also highly reliable with N + 1 design for key cooling systems. As with all key systems, these are protected by dual perimeter fencing.
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