The opening ceremony included speeches by Marco Antonio Prieto, technical director of ASAC Comunicaciones; Alberto González, general director of FADE; Ángel Luis Cabal, general director of Information and Communication Technologies of the Government of Asturias; and José Avelino Sánchez Menéndez, mayor of Llanera.
The newly unveiled data center is one of the most advanced in Spain, thanks to its official TIER III certification. ASAC thus becomes the only provider in northern Spain with a TIER III data center designed for providing external services, the other being located in Barcelona. The initial investment in equipment exceeds one million euros, not including data processing and storage equipment.
The Uptime Institute, the only international body that issues TIER certifications, analyzed the construction project of ASAC's new Datacenter and issued the TIER III certification at the end of 2014, making it the sixth Spanish Datacenter certified at this level along with those of Mapfre, La Caixa, Mediapro, the United Nations and T-Systems, the latter being the only one of them designed for the provision of services to third parties, along with ASAC's.
Currently, we are providing services to a large number of clients nationwide, including IFEMA, FECYT, SEPI, the provincial councils of Burgos, Toledo and Valladolid, the city councils of Oviedo, Móstoles and Benicarló, among others, as well as other public entities such as the Port of Ferrol, the Port of Málaga or the Consell Insular of Ibiza, and private companies such as Meliá, Aytos, Grupo Daniel Alonso, MMR Bikes, Cafés Candelas and many more.
The new data center is equipped entirely with Schneider Electric technology, the most advanced available on the market, achieving significant energy savings thanks to its hot aisle thermal insulation system, free cooling systems, and the high efficiency of its uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). In addition to savings in energy costs for climate control, the data center has also achieved savings in space utilization and system management.
All challenges related to data center layout, cooling, physical and environmental security, and fire prevention are covered by the StruxureWare for Data Centers management platform, Schneider Electric's DCIM, which monitors and acts in real time on any incident, even allowing the simulation of failures to understand and optimize existing infrastructure resources and generate the greatest savings and maximum efficiency.
The data center is initially equipped internally with a high-density thermal enclosure consisting of 32 rack cabinets, of which 20 are for equipment, 6 for air conditioning, and 5 for UPS systems and power distribution. The maximum power of this system is 160kW. Outside, there are two chillers with the latest market technologies (inverter and free cooling) with a cooling capacity of 130kW each, and a 400kVA generator for continuous power supply.
Fire protection is based on an early detection system and a water mist extinguishing system from the manufacturer Marioff, a pioneer in the application of this technique in Datacenters.
Convinced that its data center needs will change as the business evolves, ASAC has based its data center expansion on a modular architecture. The entire facility is designed for hot-swapping, without service interruption, and complies with the international TIER III standard for which it was designed and certified. The initially planned growth would allow for tripling its capacity, which would entail the addition of two chillers and a second generator.
Technical Conference
Prior to the inauguration, a technical conference on Data Processing Centers was held, in which Jon Mikel López, Engineering Director of PQC, spoke on “Design of next-generation Data Processing Centers”; Jorge Jiménez, DCIM & Data Center Life Cycle Service Product Manager of Schneider Electric, spoke on “Energy and operational efficiency of the Data Center”; and Marco A. Prieto, technical director of ASAC Comunicaciones, spoke on “ASAC’s New TIER III Data Center”.
