Continent 8 Data On Demand


New high tech, high density server room is environmentally friendly
 
The Isle of Man-headquartered online gambling hosting and consultancy firm Continent 8 has started operating its latest facility expansion.
 
The new server room is part of the company’s “Data Centre On Demand” strategy designed to rapidly build facilities, as needed, to meet growing customer needs.
 
While it is one of Continent 8’s smallest server rooms, weighing in with a capacity of 20 cabinets, it is among the most environmentally friendly and capable, with the ability to support high-density cabinets.
 
There is no raised floor—this is made possible with a new cooling design that uses in-row cooling units. While this does reduce the amount of total racks in the room, it provides a host of advantages that include faster construction, simpler room maintenance and increased floor loads.
 
Ease of room re-configuration is further extended with the deployment of a bus bar power distribution system that allows hot-swappable power connections throughout the room. What this means is customers will be able to upgrade any cabinet’s power specifications without the need for rewiring or affecting other cabinets in the room.
 
Continent 8 has also improved the practical safety of the room by making it one of the first facilities in the world to feature portable NOVEC 1230 fire extinguishers in addition to the main room fire suppression system. This allows the control of a localised fire threat without the need to evacuate and deploy the room-wide system. NOVEC 1230 is an environmentally and equipment friendly alternative to the more traditional FM-200 systems.
 
Other environmentally friendly features include the use of an energy-saving LED lighting system throughout and variable speed fans in the cooling system.
 
The facility is managed by Martin Heimann, who has over 20 years experience in project management, mechanical designs, facilities management and implementation of systems for a wide variety of mission critical facilities.