Finalists announced for eBay modular datacentre
Six finalists have been announced for the eBay's recent request for proposals (RFP) for a new, high-density, modular, containerised datacentre.
On Wednesday, Dean Nelson, eBay's senior director of global datacentre strategy, announced that the finalists had been picked for eBay's new datacentre. Out of 17 official submissions, 6 finalists had been selected.
The datacentre's shell is already being constructed by eBay and it will ultimately comprise of an 8,000 square foot ground floor and a roof of matched-size that has been fortified to accommodate up to 12 40 foot containers. Though the scale of the facility is small, when compared to others such as Facebook's 300,000 square foot datacentre in Oregon, the companies needed to satisfy stringent criteria.
The RFP finalists' proposals needed to fulfil the following criteria: a flexible design that could accommodate multi-tier deployments (I to III), air-cooled IT equipment, liquid-cooled IT equipment and the ability to deliver water at varying temperatures to different individual components (standalone servers, racks or whole containers, et cetera). Ultimately, eBay want the facility, located in Phoenix, Arizona, to be able to 100 percent free-cooled.
Modular and container-based datacentres are becoming a major option for companies when considering datacentre deployments: Capgemini's free-cooled datacentre in Swindon uses a containerised architecture to attain its high levels of efficiency, while the US government has recently commissioned a modular and containerised datacentre guidebook to help it choose facility types for its upcoming period of IT consolidation.