On August 15, 2011 eBay pre-announced the release of their second Modular Data Center RFP through Data Center Pulse. The goal was to make the industry aware of what was coming so they could prepare to respond.
On August 19, 2011 eBay announced the official release of their second Modular RFP in Salt Lake City, Utah - Project Quicksilver. They leveraged Data Center Pulse to reach the largest audience of design and construction engineers as well as hardware, software and solutions partners to tackle the problem. Lessons learned in Project Mercury around design and fine tuning the RFP process will be applied to this project. The goal is to find the right partners with the right skills and solutions to deliver.
On October 25, 2011 eBay announced the selection of the five finalists in the second Modular Data Center RFP. The finalists are: Advance Design Engineers, Inc (ADC), Team: Deerns & Gensler, KlingStubbins, M+W Group, and Team: Winterstreet Architects & AHA Consulting Engineers. These finalists will receive compensation for their design work to date and have the opportunity to present to the DCP end user community in early 2012. These five companies presented their solutions to the eBay leadership team over the last two days. Additional evaluations will continue in November with the winner of the RFP announced in December, 2011.
We are consutructing a new building on one of the three adjacent 15 acre phases of the Salt Lake City, Utah Data Center that we opened in 2010. You can see the phases from the arial photo below. The initial delivery of IT critial power will be 4MW, with scale to 30MW. The design must be completed in Q1 of 2012, with construction starting in Q2 and full commissioning complete by 12/21/2012.
Requirements
We are letting engineers "engineer" by removing the restrictions of traditional data center design. They create a box that they can fill however they want to achieve or exceed the design parameters. We want the participates to push the boundaries and come up with some incredibly flexible and efficient innovations. This design should allow a useful life of > 10 years even with technology changing rapidly inside the four walls. The RFP goes into more technical details/requirements but these are some of the high level requirements:
Server racks from 5-40kW
Server containers that can scale from 100kW and up.
All locations (racks & containers) must have air and hot-water cooling available
Expand power and cooling capacity in a modular basis
Ability to select or change Tier level from Tier 1 to concurrently maintainable Tier 2 or 3.
Free cooling year round in Utah
Rack or MEP UPS flexibility (choose)
400V distribution to the server rack PDUs
Entire design must be highly cost effective.
December 8, 2011 - In the episode, Dean Nelson and Mike Lewis discuss project Quicksilver with the winners of the open RFP, Conleth O'Flynn from AHA Consulting Engineers and Mark Meche from Winterstreet Archtiects.
October 25, 2011 - In the episode, Dean Nelson interviews Mike Lewis, Director of Mission Critical Engineering at eBay, James Monahan, Partner at CDCDG about the Public RFP process, scoring and selection of the finalists for Project Quicksilver.
August 19, 2011 - Dean Nelson and Mike Lewis officially release the Quicksilver RFP describing the Scope, Schedule, Requirements and Process to participate.
August 15, 2011 - Pre-release Video where Dean Nelson gives the industry a heads up that the second round of the eBay Modular Data Center RFP is coming. Be prepared to compete.
Schedule
08/19/11 - RFP Opens, RFIs accepted (DONE)
10/07/11 - RFP Close, Responses Due (DONE)
10/17/11 - Finalists Notified (DONE)
10/26/11 - Finalist Presentations start (DONE)
10/28/11 - Finalist Presentations conclude (DONE)
10/28/11 - eBay project team evaluations start (DONE)
12/08/11 - RFP Winner announced (DONE)
12/08/11 - Design work starts (DONE)
04/01/12 - Data Center Construction starts (ON-TRACK)
10/01/12 - Data Center Construction complete (ON-TRACK)
12/21/12 - Data Center Commissioning complete (ON-TRACK)
01/01/13 - Data Center Operational (ON-TRACK)
03/30/13 - Site Go Live (ON-TRACK)
Winner
Announced December 8, 2011 through this blog entry.
Finalists
Announced October 25, 2011 through this blog entry.
RFI Responses
We will be uploaded RFI reponses here.
Scoring
Each company will be scored in the manner detailed in the eBay scoresheet.
Photos
August 19, 2011 - Site Plan Photo with phases to choose from.
DCP Stack Version 2.1
