The T8 lights are controlled by occupancy sensors to ensure the lights are only on when people are in the facility.
“Co-location facilities are becoming more and more strategic to enterprise and government customers as they search for the most cost-effective IT infrastructure expansion, as well as, business continuity and disaster recovery solutions,” said Dan Maynard, vice president and general manager for
tw telecom. “This facility will be equipped with green and emerging technologies to be extremely energy-efficient and to reliably store a customer’s data. It also supports the state-of-the-art power and cooling needs of our customers.”
“I applaud tw telecom’s decision to locate their second Capital Region co-location facility at the STEP,” said Francis J. Murray Jr., president and chief executive officer of NYSERDA. “Home to clean energy and environmental technology companies working hard to advance Governor David A. Paterson’s clean energy agenda, STEP is a natural fit for tw telecom to locate as the energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly technologies to be deployed at the site will reduce energy consumption and help improve our environment.”
tw telecom co-location facilities throughout the country protect customers from the risk of downtime and its Ethernet and voice services improve the quality of a customer’s network while reducing its costs.
Technical assistance provided by NYSERDA’s New Construction program identified several design features that will significantly reduce electricity load and add to environmental sustainability within the facility that go above and beyond what other centers currently use. For example, cooling of data centers consumes large amounts of energy. While most existing facilities use inefficient direct-expansion air cooled HVAC, this new facility, located at STEP, will use water-cooled, high efficiency chillers and what is known as a water-side economizer that utilizes cold winter air to aid in providing the necessary data center cooling.
Server cooling, another large consumer of energy within data centers, is impacted by hot and cold air mixing within the data center. The tw telecom facility at STEP will achieve hot aisle/cold aisle efficiency through a raised floor design, server layout, and physical separations between hot and cold aisles; known as blanking to ensure that cold air is fed to the front of the servers and hot air is exhausted and removed from the space. Many data centers do not adhere to this design guideline.
“Ultimately, we connect customers locally and across the country with quality, reliability and scale, thereby adding value to our vast fiber networks,” Maynard said. “That is the power of tw telecom – networking and co-lo solutions that customers demand and depend on.”
tw telecom is a US-based provider of managed voice, internet and data networking solutions for businesses.
