This week DuPont Fabros Technologies announced that it had opened Phase II A of its SC1 Santa Clara, California data center. The company has also begun development of Phase II B of the data center which is expected to be online in March 2015. When fully completed, the facility will include a total of 36.4 megawatts of available critical power load and 176,000 square feet of space.
The completion of Phase II A makes 9.1 megawatts of critical load available, and another 9.1 MW will come with Phase II B. The critical load of the California data center is currently 77 percent leased, and 75 percent of the available computer room space is also spoken for. DuPont Fabros clients include Facebook, Yahoo, Rackspace and Microsoft.
The Santa Clara SC1 California data center is the first to utilize ?DuPont Fabros’ new electrical system design, which makes it possible to reduce the size of deployed capacity to less than was previously possible. When bringing other data centers online, DuPont Fabros would not have been able to start with one amount of capacity and then scale these resources up at a later date without disrupting the delivery of power that was already running, according to DuPont Fabros spokeman Christopher Warnke.
“It depends on where we see potential prospects, lease signing, etc,” said Warnke. “We could go down to 4.55 MW in that facility if we wanted to.”
Aside from client need, there are multiple variables that determine what size increment will be used. The type of uninterrupted power supply and generator are in use and ?DuPont Fabros’ N+2 redundancy scheme are the biggest factors in limiting the capacity.
