Inside Telecity's co-location datacentre

Telecity Powergate datacentre

TelecityGroup's three-year-old Powergate co-location facility in west London is in the middle of an expansion that will see its IT floor space triple.

Powergate is used as a spillover capacity site for data from Telecity's five Docklands-based and two City-based datacentres. The facility has a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of around 1.65. As a co-location provider, Telecity is not able to choose the hardware in the facility, but it has some control over how it can increase energy efficiency.

It offers varying levels of security to companies, ranging from open racks (left) to cages (centre back) to cages with biometric and/or password protection (right). Because of this, it cannot easily arrange the racks into regimented designs, as used in facilities run by sole providers such as Rackspace's UK cloud datacentre.

What it can do, however, is put shells around the racks with in-built chimneys to conduct the hot air up and as far away from the computer room air-conditioning (Crac) cooling units as possible. Maximising the distance from the hot air and the cold air boosts the efficiencies of the cooling systems, according to Telecity.

The problems of heat will grow over time, Rob Coupland, Telecity's chief operating officer, believes. He told ZDNet UK that in five or six years' time, he expects datacentre companies will have to find ways to deal with a higher amount of electricity per rack, as servers grow ever more intensive in power consumption, driven by more and more processors fitting into each server.

Photo credit: Jack Clark

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