New data centre in Amsterdam helps support customer growth

3W Infra has migrated its IaaS infrastructure including dedicated servers and network infrastructure to a new data hall within Switch data centres’ Amsterdam-based data centre complex, Switch AMS1.

This new data centre features a highly energy-efficient data centre design through the use of indirect adiabatic cooling technology and hot aisle containment (calculated pPUE = 1.04). Its efficiency and highly redundant 2N power configuration would cater to the up-time needs of customers with demanding applications including enterprises, cloud providers, gaming companies, and financials.

Designed for flexibility and scalability, this new data centre hall in Switch AMS1 offers an extended capacity of about 400 data centre racks and enables 3W Infra to offer companies considerable growth perspective.

Its scalable power modules starting at 5A per cabinet up to 25A for high-density requirements (scalable steps of Ampere) are aimed at a wide range of customer types - from startups to enterprises and companies with demanding applications.

3W Infra expects to complete its phased data centre infrastructure migration at the end of April 2017.

Roy Premchand, Managing Director of 3W Infra said: “The 2N power configuration gives 3W Infra customers a robust 100% uptime guarantee instead of the 99,999% we had before. The easy-scalable power modules available onsite allow our clients to grow their power infrastructure in a cost-efficient way. They can start with 5A and grow their infrastructure with 5A each time they need to add more power for their equipment.”

“Power, cabling, security…really all data centre infrastructure included in this newly built data hall is very robust,” added Premchand. “The robustness and high security features will help us meet ISO 27001 requirements, as we’re currently aiming to achieve ISO/IEC 27001 certification for Information Security Management.”

The newly commissioned data hall in Amsterdam, Switch AMS1, is one of the first colocation data centres in Europe that’s suitable for Open Rack Systems based on OCP principles. The Open Compute Project (OCP) originates with Facebook, while companies like Intel and Microsoft joined the OCP in an early stage. A variety of industry giants joined the OCP later on, including Google, Cisco, IBM, NetApp, Lenovo, Ericsson, and AT&T. It means that Switch AMS1 is a modern premises well suited for housing OCP-specified equipment based on open standards. Its infrastructural efficiency would also be a good fit for 3W Infra’s ‘pure-play’ IaaS business regarding the delivery of traditional, highly customised dedicated server technology, colocation services and IP Transit.

“We expect to continue our exponential growth rate, as we have quite some large sales opportunities in our sales pipeline,” added Premchand. “A variety of potential customers has shown interest in the new data hall already, companies with extensive and complex infrastructures I must say, but they were waiting until we have finished our migration processes.”