The 288-acre headquarters campus includes 830,000 square feet of offices, research and development laboratories, and the 24-year-old data center. The main building is 30 years old, and the addition of the research and development laboratories have existed for 22 years.
“Our onsite data center is a standalone building on our main campus that is more than 60,000 square feet and houses a variety of typical data processing equipment and associated environmental control systems,” Guck says.
The information technology (IT) department for Frito-Lay, which is owned by PepsiCo, is responsible for the operation of the data center and uses third parties for a variety of associated services.
“Our corporate facilities department is responsible for operations and maintenance for the building infrastructure, including HVAC and electrical systems,” Guck says.
“The building was originally designed in 1991 with 2-2.5 megawatt (MW) feeders from separate substations connected to our main switchgear, with the building load split across the two feeders,” he says. “In the event of a feeder loss, the load would automatically switch to the alternate active feeder with an automatic tie-breaker. In the rare event of both feeders going out, there was a 2 MW emergency generator that would pick up the building load until utility feeders were reenergized.”
As is the case with many organizations that rely on data gathering and analysis to support its operations, Frito-Lay officials eventually began to contemplate an expansion of the data to meet its expanding needs.
“The goal of the upgrade project was to significantly increase the power capacity to the building without causing an outage to our mission-critical data processing loads,” Guck says. “As the building data processing demands increased, we needed to leverage more than 2.5 MW of capacity. We decided to leverage the total 5 MW capabilities of the two feeders, but we needed to add an additional 2 MW emergency generator and change the method of how the power was supplied.
“In the revised power feed to the building, we routed each of the existing 2.5 MW feeders through new power paralleling switchgear, along with the feeders from the 2-2.5 MW emergency generators with output of paralleling switchgear feeding the original main building switchgear. We also disabled and locked out the automatic tie-breaker in the original switchgear.”
Frito-Lay Data Center Expansion Shows Value of Maintenance Department
Data Center Expansion Meets Growing Need
