Project Mercury is born...

Today, we are pleased to announce that EDI, along with their partners AHA Consulting Engineers and Winterstreet Architects, have been selected as the winner of the Modular Data Center RFP - now dubbed as Project Mercury.

This has been an extremely interesting process for us with an unexpected result. EDI, a small company that we had never even heard of before, was able to meet all of the challenging requirements we had proposed to the industry through the Modular RFP process in a cost effective, simple design. In addition, a very compelling ultra dense product named "eHive" emerged from Skanska, one of the RFP finalists. It has not been released publicly yet (stay tuned for follow up). While Skanska was not selected for the RFP, their modular product was innovative enough to warrant further consideration in this data center deployment. All in all, the open RFP process did exactly what we had hoped. It enabled design engineers the opportunity to shed the traditional barriers, consider the difficult challenges and start with a clean slate. The outcome was new and compelling solutions as well as new innovative products driven by the free cooling, density and flexibility requirements.

In the video below we go into more details about the process, the team and the challenge that still lies ahead. We made the decision to engage with EDI and explore the Skanska product in mid November. From that point the team has been working non-stop to make up the time we lost during the RFP process. While the selection process took almost two months longer than anticipated, the end date did not change. We are still laser focused on completing the Data Center by summer 2011.

In the design sessions that started in mid-November there has been lively discussions and debate where phrases such as "Hot Water Cooling","Extreme Density", "Rapid Deployment", "Multi-Tier", and "Rack & Roll" were common. Day one, I sat down with the team and tasked them to solve the challenge holistically, not just from a Data Center availability perspective. I detailed the IT equipment that will be going into the Data Cener and how it must be fully integrated with the facility. it is all about density, rapid deployment and sustained efficiency even under varying work load. This balance is where extreme efficiency can emerge. Data Center Facilities and IT equipment are not mutually exclusive, they should work in harmony.

Keep an eye on the Modular Page and our YouTube channel for updates as we build project Mercury!  It's getting hot in here!

Contact: modular@datacenterpulse.org