Aimes Opens North West Data Centre with Help from Keysource

AIMES Grid Services, a leading provider of cloud services, has completed its data centre at the Liverpool Innovation Park, Merseyside. Designed and built by Keysource, the data centre is part of an ongoing £5 million infrastructure investment and has been developed to achieve high levels of security, resilience, scalability and energy efficiency. The flexible 10,000 sq ft facility is the first phase of a new Cloud Computing Campus, with the potential to increase capacity to a total of 35,000 sq ft.

It offers data centre space that supports high-density equipment in a highly resilient and cost effective manner to enhance the company's ability to deliver a full range of managed digital services including collocation, real and virtual hosting, platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). Keysource designed the multiphase project to provide a resilient infrastructure capable of supporting an IT load of 1MW with up to 180 rack positions and a specified PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of below 1.4 from day one.

The first phase provides an initial IT load of up to 375kW and 60 rack positions, with the ability cool up to 20kW per rack. The new facility utilises key aspects of Keysource's Ecofris solution that maximises free cooling and efficiency by taking advantage of the lower ambient temperatures in the North of England and making use of increased temperature regimes. It uses variable speed control fans with free cooling chillers, as well as effective hot and cold air separation and through wall flooded airflow topology to deliver an efficient solution.

High levels of redundancy have also been adopted with 2N UPS and electrical infrastructure, N+1 standby power generation and cooling systems. As a result, the concurrently maintainable design will achieve availability of more than 99.98 per cent. In addition, Keysource is providing a maintenance service including planned preventative and reactive requirements to avoid unnecessary downtime and ensure that all equipment continues to deliver on-going optimum performance.

Professor Dennis Kehoe, Chief Executive of AIMES Grid Services commented: "We are undertaking a range of innovative projects to improve the services provided to our existing and future clients. Our partnership with Keysource means we have been able to take advantage of their proven track record in designing and building advanced data centre solutions, which is enabling us to deliver cost effective, shared-resource solutions to both cloud and colocation clients.

Rob Elder, Director of Keysource said: "We identified AIMES as a leader in developing next generation cloud services and are delighted we have an opportunity to work with them on this exciting project. The synergy with AIMES was evident with both organisations looking to embrace new technologies to further improve efficiency and deliver high performance data centres, and I look forward to our strategic relationship developing as we explore other innovative solutions in the virtualised environment."