eBay Unveils $287M, Energy-Saving Data Center in Utah

by | May 27, 2010

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eBay’s new $287-million Topaz data center in Utah is now officially open, housing the company’s core businesses —  ebay.com and PayPal.com. The data center is 50 percent less expensive to operate than the average of all other data centers eBay leases thanks to many energy-efficiency features including a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.4.

The data center is a 240,000-square-foot two-story building with three 20,000 square-foot rooms to house IT equipment — one for eBay Marketplace, one for PayPal and the remaining IT room for further consolidation work.

Dean Nelson, eBay’s senior director of Global Data Center Strategy told DataCenter Knowledge that it is a fault tolerant Tier IV level data center that is also 30 percent more efficient than the most efficient data center in its portfolio. “At a designed PUE of 1.4, it lowers both our economical and ecological costs. We only consume the energy we need, when we need it.”

Nelson shared project details and photos in a blog post at Data Center Pulse.

Here are some energy-efficiency details of the new data center.

eBay is using 400-V power distribution, which eliminates an entire level of transformers and delivers 230V to the servers, saving 2 percent in power costs.

The data center is cooled using a water-side economizer system, which is supported by a 400,000 gallon cistern that collects rain water. eBay expects to use outside air to cool the data center for more than half the year.

eBay is also using in-row cooling units for close-coupled cooling, and a hot air containment system to isolate the hot and cold air within the server area. eBay says it can support power densities of up to 30kw per rack using this design.

The company expects to earn Gold-level certification for the facility under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program for energy-efficient buildings.

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