GIGA Data Centers, LLC (GIGA) has announced the construction of its newest facility. Located in Mooresville, NC, a northern suburb in the greater Charlotte area, the data center goes live February 2019 and will supply 60 MW of capacity at 4.1₵ per kWhr and a power use efficiency (PUE) rating of < 1.15 — guaranteed. These game-changing operational figures bring high-performance data center capabilities — typically only afforded by large hyperscale corporations — to small and mid-sized businesses as well as enterprise companies across the IT-supported industries of ecommerce, finance, gaming, health care, and many others, as well as users seeking private cloud deployments.

Many large enterprises including Facebook and Google have major data center expansions already underway. For years these companies have utilized modular enclosure systems to easily scale their infrastructures and achieve a lower cost, more energy and water efficiencies as well as greater in-rack power flexibility to support high performance compute. However, most companies can only co-locate their IT in a traditional raised-floor data center. This approach has its limits and uses high-cost, low-efficiency designs that support power density that tops out at 7 kW per rack.   

Already proven in over 28 turnkey deployments for enterprises and federal agencies including the Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Energy (DoE), GIGA’s modularized Tier 3+ data centers will bring high efficiency, high power and low-cost performance found in hyperscale facilities to the multi-tenant colocation market. Now any business is capable of leveraging hyper-converged and other High Performance Computing systems in their data centers without breaking the bank or failing to support their rack power needs. 

“In most data centers, for every dollar of electricity used to support the servers in a rack, they need another dollar to run their infrastructure, HVAC, lights, etc. By contrast, a GIGA data center takes only 15 cents or less to operate our infrastructure because we use our 7th generation WindChill™ Modular Enclosure to provide hot & cold aisle isolation and our proprietary adiabatic cooling. This unique cooling method dynamically supports rack-power densities up to 50kW and still delivers a true industry-leading PUE of 1.15 or better,” said Jake Ring, president & CEO at GIGA. “In addition, we don’t charge for space, only for the power consumed and it takes just three days to assemble and install new WindChill™ units — making it easy to rapidly scale.”

Every enclosure in a GIGA data center provides a private, secure suite for the client’s equipment. Customers receive unlimited rack-power flexibility, high efficiency and a scalable capacity at lower cost when compared to what is traditionally available. Compared to other data centers, the Mooresville, NC, GIGA data center has true advantages:

• Power density in typical data centers is 7 kW vs. GIGA at up to 50 kW per rack.
• Industry leading PUE of 1.15 provides 85% better operating efficiency.
• Incremental capacity that scales in days as opposed to months/years in a traditional data center.
• Power supplied by Duke Energy is on a high-reliability circuit connected to two base-load generation stations, providing electricity at 4.1₵ per kWhr.

GIGA is perfect for hyper-converged systems, such as from Nutanix. An NX-3000 appliance uses 1.5kW on average, so a traditional 7kW rack can only support three appliances. GIGA can support twenty-two appliances in one rack, or the same number that would require eight racks in a traditional data center.

For organizations taking advantage of GIGA’s new data center, the State of North Carolina has provided a sales tax abatement for all equipment that companies locate to the facility and for the associated electricity consumed as well. Additionally there is an 80% discounted property tax rate for the next seven years. These special discounts give GIGA’s new Mooresville facility another distinct cost-saving advantage over traditional established data centers.

In addition, GIGA has secured funding and is planning to build 15 data centers over the next three years. With this liquidity, GIGA is actively pursuing development in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, to bring its low-lost, high capacity, high efficiency data centers to customers within these strategic markets.

“Edge markets need the performance of GIGA’s data centers to support the buildout of greater network capacity and the application of high-performance computing for Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles and the dispersion of data collection from devices supporting IoT,” said Daniel Robbins, GIGA’s EVP of Data Center Solutions.