1&1 Internet rose to the web-hosting industry’s top spot worldwide by offering reliability, innovation, and efficient, automated operation. As a result, the Germany-based company posted a 99.9 percent uptime rating.
1&1 offers dedicated servers that help control costs for business and home website owners. The 1&1 business model has drawn more than nine million customer contracts, which operate on more than 70,000 servers. “We recognized that building data center capability in the U.S. was essential to maintaining our promise of optimal speed, connectivity, and reliability for web site owners here,” said Thorsten Ziegler, head of Data Center U.S. for 1&1.
The company began operations in the United States with a 4,500-sq-ft colocation data center in New York City. The business grew exponentially, and the data center quickly reached its capacity. 1&1 then expanded with another colocation center in New Jersey, which also quickly filled.
Company executives sought a long-term solution that would accommodate continued growth. 1&1 set out to build a new cutting-edge facility, so they retained Burr Computer Environments, Inc., of Houston, to design, build, and manage the project construction. The project began with the leasing of a warehouse in Lenexa, KS, near Kansas City. The area is not only geographically centered, but it’s also situated near a concentration of fiber optic cables running along the many railroad beds that track through the city. The plethora of cables, two redundant backbone routing systems, and geographically diverse ten-gigabit connections provide highly efficient data transfer throughout the country.
Leasing an existing building eliminated the time required to build from the ground up, including time for obtaining a raft of construction permits. The warehouse, however, would not meet 1&1’s high standards for data-center efficiency, reliability, or security, especially since it’s located in the tornado-plagued Midwest. The solution: construct a freestanding building within the warehouse. The “building-within-a-building” design makes the facility itself redundant and protected from tornadic events.
Burr designed, built, and commissioned Phase I of the facility in six months. At 55,000 sq ft, the building provides more than enough space for offices and five data center rooms. Data center space totals about half the building’s square footage and is designed for 600 watts per sq ft for each room. The space provides capacity for years of aggressive growth and is highly energy efficient. The server rack system, for example, was specially designed and optimized before construction to run at 90 to 95 percent efficiency.
Additionally, 100 percent of the center’s energy consumption is offset by renewable energy through the purchase of Renewable Energy Certificates from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. Globally, 1&1’s initiatives allow the company to avert the generation of 30,000 tons of CO2 annually.
The interior building’s 4-ft. raised floor is one of the facility’s most interesting features. It allowed chilled water piping and electrical services to be installed quickly, and avoided cutting into the existing concrete floor. Three completely independent and autonomous chilled water plants in a 2N+1 redundant configuration cool the facility. Each water plant has its own set of air-cooled chillers, pumps, and piping system for chilled water distribution. Thermal storage buffer tanks minimize the effect of a failed chiller on the system.
Computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units cool the server racks and pressurize the plenum below the raised floor. The CRACS in each server room are split evenly between the chilled water systems for added redundancy.