It was inevitable.
Power reliability now stands beside compute equipment performance as an equal partner in delivering 100% data center services availability.
“Telx carefully planned, effectively constructed, rigorously tested and carefully maintains our cloud connection centers and stands behind that effort, offering our clients a 100% uptime SLA,” said Rich Coleman, director of construction at Telx, a data center colocation services company headquartered in New York.
Besides power reliability, power quality also is an essential element in the power supply equation, whether it’s from the normal source or on-site. It’s critical to prolonging customers’ colocation equipment lifecycles.
So no matter how it’s sliced, protected, and conditioned power needs to be a crucial part of a top-notch data center infrastructure. To get it done required a new approach.
Design, Construction Benchmark
Michael Terlizzi, executive vice president of engineering and construction at Telx, said, “Our goal when we embarked on the NJR3 project was to set a new benchmark for design and construction of data center facilities in New Jersey and by all accounts, we achieved that goal.”
It has, in fact, become the flagship in the company’s fleet of 20 centers across the U.S., growing to more than 1.1 million sq ft.
The 8.8 acre Clifton campus consists of two buildings totaling nearly 500,000 sq ft and sits outside of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 500-year flood plain. This campus boasts unparalleled security, utility feeds delivered from diverse generating stations, and a robust 2N uninterruptible power supply (UPS) architecture. At this writing, it stands as the only Tier III constructed colocation facility in the New York/New Jersey metro area.
Four isolated ASCO paralleling switchgear enclosures allow for 2N power paths to critical loads during switchgear maintenance windows, which is one of several features that exceeds the Tier III requirements.
Teamwork Hurdles Challenges
Telx, Highland Associates — the project’s consulting engineer — and ASCO collaborated on developing power switching and controls solutions for the campus’s demanding power reliability requirements. High-level engineering, technical support, and project management from ASCO ensured the power system would support Telx’ 100% service level agreement (SLA) guarantees.
“The project was a group effort,” Coleman said. “Trust is a key element. Highland understands our business model and knows exactly how we want our centers designed. They allow us to think outside of the box and evaluate our design ideas as a team.
“I know ASCO equipment from when I was an electrician and personally wired up their transfer switches 20 years ago. I knew we could rely on their product and their team to deliver.”
