PwC packs a punch

Innovative design includes thermal cooling, high-powered electrical infrastructure

ATLANTA -- When PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S. CIO Stuart Fulton walks through the company's spankin' new data center, opened this month, he finds "cool things around just about every corner."

"Particularly when compared to the existing data center, the contrast is quite amazing," Fulton says.

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ATLANTA -- When PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S. CIO Stuart Fulton walks through the company's spankin' new data center, opened this month, he finds "cool things around just about every corner."

"Particularly when compared to the existing data center, the contrast is quite amazing," Fulton says.

One immediately noticeable feature is the white thermoplastic olefin (TPO) roof topping the building and reducing heat entering the facility, he says. Made of ethylene propylene rubber, TPO single-ply roof "membranes" combine the durability of rubber with the proven performance of hot-air weldable seams. Also visually impressive -- not to mention efficiency smart -- are six fan wall units, each with 24 fans, that will keep cool air circulating about IT gear, he adds.

Marching order

PwC, a professional services firm with U.S. headquarters in New York, set out to build a state-of-the-art data center almost three years ago. By January 2007, already having extended the life of its existing data center by three years with power, cooling and IT upgrades, but having little capacity left, the clock was ticking loud and clear.

John Regan, PwC's director of data center services, challenged his multidisciplinary team with this goal: "Build a Tier 3 data center that runs like a Tier 4 at the cost of a Tier 2."

Data center construction finished slightly ahead of schedule and a bit below budget, which PwC declined to specify. "Having the team work toward executing along those lines made them very sensitive to the overall cost while driving the best functionality into the environment. Ultimately, we ended up with a Tier 3-plus data center," Regan adds.

As classified by the Uptime Institute, Tier 2 data centers have a single, non-redundant distribution path serving the IT infrastructure, while Tier 3 facilities have multiple paths. Tier 4 data centers have multiple, independent, physically isolated systems, each having redundant capacity components and multiple distribution paths serving the IT racks.

PwC expects the data center to receive Gold certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design from the U.S. Green Building Council. Largely because of the new data center, PwC already has earned designation as a top green IT organization for 2009 from Computerworld, a Network World sister publication.

With its certificate of occupancy in hand, the team anticipates beginning to load up the data center with IT gear late this year. Initially the facility will house more than 4,000 physical and virtual servers and support about 2.8 petabytes of storage -- enough to accommodate current and future needs, Fulton says. Dual carrier OC-192 -- 10Gbps SONET -- connections feed into the data center. The internal network fabric switching operates between 1G and 40Gb at the port level and the storage-area-network (SAN) backbone will operate at speeds of 4Gb at the edge and 8Gb at the core.

PwC will support all lines of business and back-office applications from the center, as well as the network and communications needs for its 31,000 U.S. employees. It is working on an application migration plan that will stretch over an 18- to 24-month window, Fulton says.