Saving copper in the data center

Photo courtesy of Jack Hess at Flickr

Sometimes saving millions of dollars in a data center design is as simple as figuring out a way to use less copper. That’s how it worked for Australian data center colocation company Polaris.

Mike Andrea, director of the strategic directions group at the company, explained at AFCOM’s Data Center World show in Nashville last week how his company saved about $30 million in copper costs when building its new 65,000-square-foot facility.

“We just went multistory rather than one story,” he said, describing how the $200 million colo facility has five floors of IT and data center facility space. “We did it because of the cost of copper.”

The facility officially opened in February, with Andrea saying it was 89% leased by the time construction was completed. He also described the redundancy and modularity built into the facility, which Polaris designed into it from day 1.

See some of our other coverage from Data Center World:

• Upgrading a live data center: a nail-biting experience
• Data center disaster recovery gets tougher in tough times
• AFCOM data center manager of the year weathers hurricane, merger
• Data center power management at forefront of IT agenda