A new data centre for the Isle of Anglesey County Council at Llangefni has saved the local taxpayers a significant amount of money by renovating an existing room rather than building a brand new facility. In addition running costs have been slashed, and the carbon footprint of the building reduced by using a state of the art free-air cooling system. Anglesey County Council now has a far more efficient and reliable information and communications technology (ICT) set-up in which to serve the people of Anglesey.
Since 2007 the ICT staff at Anglesey have realised that the old computer room in the Council offices at Llangefni could no longer cope with the rising IT demands of the Council. The old computer room was running out of space, lacked any kind of back up power (so making it very vulnerable to power cuts) and used old and inefficient air conditioning to try and keep the IT equipment cool.
At one point the Council’s ICT staff considered a new data centre in a dedicated building nearby but that could have cost in excess of a million pounds to build and equip. The Anglesey team, led by Barry Eaton, realised that the same outcome could be achieved by a sophisticated renovation and enlargement programme of the existing area for a substantially lower cost.
The Council appointed data centre specialist design engineers Capitoline LLP, based in Cheshire, to review the Council’s requirement and design a modern, reliable and efficient computer room operation.
Based on the Council’s current and projected ICT requirement Capitoline accurately sized the requirement for space, power, cooling and interconnectivity and designed in a twenty-minute battery back-up power supply system to keep the Council up and running through the majority of power cuts. Should there be a prolonged power outage a standby generator in the car park can be simply hooked up into the system.
Barry Elliott, senior partner at Capitoline LLP, said, “What makes this installation really different is the use of free outside air to subsidise the air conditioning system. In Anglesey the air temperature is below 21 C for 80% of the year. During that time we carefully import outside filtered air to make up 25% of the room cooling requirement and thus reducing the electrical load by about 20%. We estimate this should save the Council at least £4000 per year in electricity bills and also helps the Council’s Carbon Reduction Commitment.”
The new data centre was built by North Wales builder Seddon Ltd and will be fully operational from September 2010.
http://www.capitoline.co.uk
