Equinix Data Center Tour

Equinix is an internet business exchange and colocation company. The data center on the west of Chicago is 280,000 sqft and Equinix occupies almost 2 million sqft in the US alone. In further touring, we shall talk about the data center in Chicago.

It is 3 floors, the first has the facility and infrastructure and the other 2 floors have the colocation. Security at the center is taken highly into consideration having dozens of security cameras all around. Man traps and lock doors are looked into using biometric fingerprinting technology for access into floors and rooms. The video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBIl0curTxU shows how an empty room was converted into server rooms. This was not built like a typical data center. The video showed the flooring of the entire center as concrete slabs. Being an internet exchange company, Equinix has to deliver large amounts of data through networks to customer with high speed.  For this purpose, the center had overhead cables built of copper fiber coax. The entire center was designed to be modular catering to the customer’s exact needs.

The main component of any data center would be the airflow management. Equinix uses CVAC systems for airflow on the top. Cold air was driven in the cold aisles from the top. Whereas warm air was driven in the hot aisles from bottom to top. The entire east and west sides of the building, including the colocation centers were air handler rooms. In the air handler rooms, we see the warm air that is coming up is taken into the filters kept in the rooms. The filter refreshes, recools the warm air and sends them back to the aisles accordingly. The building is on an average maintained at 68-72⁰ F. For this maintenance purpose, sensors are located in all places. If the temperature goes above, the sensors call for more cooling. The building management system in turn will vary the frequency drives. The frequency drives are available on all floors.

From the hardware side, they have eight 750 ton chillers in the air handler rooms and 8 water cooling towers on the ceiling. If the temperature outside (external temperature) falls below 45⁰ F, the mechanical cooling is shifted to technologies using the external temperature. This makes it less expensive and this reason why Chicago can be a great location for data centers.

Coming to power, the data center on average runs on 30MW. They have installed diesel generators and each generator’s capacity is 2.5MW. At all times, 12 will be online, 3 are on reserve if any of the 12 go down. In additional, they have 2 swing generators for maintenance purpose. Generators feed the switch gears too. Hence the switch gears have 2 inputs, one from the utility and one of the generators.  

Apart from all this, the Equinix data center is very customer friendly.