Cyxtera Communications leased the Weehawken, New Jersey, data center site (NJ2) in 2001 due to its proximity to Wall Street and the New York-New Jersey financial markets. The close location meant Cyxtera could take advantage of near-zero lag time in providing its proximity hosting solution to its customers. The NJ2 facility is a split tower with ten, 300-ton Trane Model RTAA air-cooled chillers—five chillers on each tower, each with a Systecon Inc. pumping system and control panel. However, the original control system did not allow for the kind of comprehensive monitoring and control that a mission-critical data center facility requires.
“It’s a critical application and these servers are tied in directly with Wall Street. Ninety percent of the work being handled in this data center is banking,” says Jason Garbus, project engineer at Cyxtera. If we lost data center precision cooling for only three to five minutes, temperatures could very quickly go from 70 to 95 degrees, and it would take at least a couple of hours to recover. That could cause all kinds of problems for our clients and their customers. Loss of control and cooling simply cannot be tolerated.”
Systecon Inc. and Trane commercial systems teamed up to install new Systecon VariPrim control panels along with Tracer Summit building control units (BCU) to communicate with the facility’s overall Automated Logic building automation system.
“The new panels include Allen Bradley SLC-5/5 processors and CTC Parker touch screen interfaces,” says Scott Corbin of Systecon. “This new control platform provides much better control—the touch screen is much more user friendly and includes extensive graphics so that operators can easily see system operating conditions. The VariPrime system is also consistent with other Cyxtera facilities. We also installed kW meters on the pumps and data center chillers so that operators can instantly see energy consumption.”
The work began in early March 2009, with a kickoff meeting for everyone involved in the project. A June 15 deadline was set but the job was completed three days early. Cyxtera upgraded its data center's chiller system with Systecon VariPrime and Tracer Summit BCU, resulting in more precise control and substantial energy savings. Instead of running all 10 chillers at full capacity, only three typically operate per tower, leading to an 18-month payback on the project. This upgrade reduced energy consumption from 2.0 to 1.3 kW per ton of cooling, saving $177,000 monthly. The project also earned $35,000 in utility rebates and ensures backup capacity in case of chiller failure, all completed without disrupting customer transactions or operations.
