NetApp’s new datacenter: 54 weeks from contract to reality

NetApp formally announced the opening of their new Hillsboro, Oregon datacenter today, almost exactly 54 weeks from their announcement that they had signed an agreement with Digital Realty to design and build their state-of-the-art facility. The new datacenter will be be the centralized location for NetApp corporate IT services as well as the monitoring point for their customer support.

The 55,000 sq ft facility has just unter 20,000 sq ft of technical space and along with NetApps own storage equipment also includes enterprise hardware from vendors such as Fujitsu and Oracle. And as no datacenter is complete these days without some sort of cloud focus, there is also an installation of the Cisco/NetApp FlexPod datacenter platform. The FlexPods are pre-validated datacenter solutions that combine Cisco UCS servers and connectivity with NetApp storage arrays and VMware virtualization.

The new datacenter was desgned with a PUE target of 1.3, and is built and equipped to the NetApp goal of having all data available at all times to users, with no traditional downtime for maintenance and upgrades.

Last July, Netapp announced that they would be building a second datacenter in the Research Triangle park area outside Raleigh, North Carolina. This facility will be available as a technology showcase for customers as well as being the location of NetApps engineering R&D teams, according to information released earlier this year.