Data Center Consolidation

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2012

When King County's data center lease expired, King County Information Technology (KCIT) made the commitment to consolidate data center locations and build a highly efficient, scalable, and green data center. Typically, data centers are redesigned only once every 15 years, so KCIT took the opportunity to design an innovative architecture that would conserve taxpayer dollars while increasing government service effectiveness. Requirements for the new data center network architecture included high availability, 10 Gigabit Ethernet to support server virtualization, ease of management to minimize operational costs, and high port density to minimize equipment costs, power, and cooling. When looking to build out the new King County Data Center, project leadership was committed to creating a more energy efficient, environment friendly IT footprint, which resulted in a data center and revised IT infrastructure that considered industry standards and guidelines like EPA EnergyStar, LEEDS, and EU CoC. The project included physically migrating over 65 TBs of storage and 476 devices from the data centers located in the 24th floor of the Seattle Municipal Tower and Fortress co‐location facility in Tukwila to the new enterprise data center facility located at the Sabey Corporation. Results of this project are promising. The King County Date Center will accommodate 4,500 kilowatts of IT load configured on diverse paths, ensuring an extremely high level of power availability. Typically this would make UPS loading less efficient; however, the data center offsets this effect by using distributed redundant topology in a 4‐to‐make‐3 line‐up. This allows the UPS modules to run near 60% or higher loading compared to 45% loading in a 2N scenario – with little if any loss of reliability. During integrated systems testing, power utilization effectiveness as low as 1.18 was recorded, in comparison with the County’s current power utilization effectiveness of between 1.51 and 1.63 depending on the season.