“Often when a large hyperscale provider is looking for a space, it has an internal plan for the year for capacity and compute - typically based on the individual business being able to support projected growth and requirements for the year. That need for sophisticated capacity planning in the data centre industry is often due to sector volatility or how fluid the business requirements for individual applications are…”
Mike Coleman, Global Head of Design & Delivery at Aligned, leads the company’s clients through the minefields of mission-critical; a solution provider able to react quickly to changing needs. “A customer may have planned for 10MW of space, but the business might realise it needs 15MW, and right now,” he says. “At Aligned, we have the capability to help them through that and ensure they have the space they need, where and when they need it.”
Aligned’s approach is to design a physical, electrical, and mechanical infrastructure that is very quickly deployable, but also deployable in the right-sized increments to meet customers’ unique capacity needs and requirements – now and in the future. “Instead of building a 50MW data centre and having it sit there waiting for it to be fully utilised, we're able to build the physical structure, whether it's a cold or a warm shell, and then incrementally deploy infrastructure at pace,” assures Coleman. “For example, we can get the mechanical backplane down to as little as 750KW of cooling capacity in an individual increment. Allied to this, our electrical topology is extremely flexible, allowing us to make adjustments towards a specific customer.”
Coleman highlights that this flexibility allows Aligned to deploy incrementally across a building in two ways. “We can add to the planned capacity for the building, but also if the customer decides that they're going to grow in place,” he explains. “From a density perspective, we can add that capacity in their current physical footprint and not require additional square footage or a lift-and-shift of equipment into a different space. That's the philosophy behind the design and the way that we're able to meet those commitments. Once we have the cold channel, we make the space ready maintaining approximately 50MW of our mechanical and electrical infrastructure rolling through the supply chain. We manage that very closely between the sites. By standardising that infrastructure from site to site, we're able to make delivery commitments with our vendors, with our suppliers, with incremental release dates that allows us to keep them up and running.”
Aligned has commoditised its processes allowing it to deploy mechanical and electrical equipment in modules. This reduces onsite construction and the labour required while also minimising disruption for any tenants using the facility. “We aim for our work to be seamless and the process to go almost unnoticed,” adds Coleman.
Future-proofing its infrastructure solutions is critical for Aligned when contemplating the overall design of a project. “Future-proofing is typically focused on increased density; with CPUs getting increasingly powerful, they draw more and more power,” notes Coleman. “Historically, what happens in the data centre when you look at the retail or wholesale environment, is that a company with a traditional 15-year lease for a larger deployment will start to see a lot of empty space in the room because as they go through a tech refresh cycle, the equipment they’re installing is getting smaller, while requiring an equal amount of cooling. When Aligned started in 2013, our goal was to drive a more sustainable approach to providing a physical structure in a number of ways. Today, we match 100% of our IT load with renewable energy sources.”