The new PT state-of-the-art data centre will include CISTER know-how

Portugal Telecom is planning a new, very large, and state-of-the-art Data Centre (12000 m2, 2000 racks, up to 32 000 servers) to begin operation in the end of 2011 / beginning of 2012. In order to tackle the increasing demands of energy savings, this new data centre must incorporate state-of-the-art techniques and technologies to enable a PUE of around 1.20. PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which is defined as PUE = Total datacentre power / IT power. This is extremely challenging as compared to current state-of-the-art data centres.

The SENODs project will use CISTER know-how and developed technologies that offer integrated solutions to address both the cyber and physical challenges posed by the large-scale energy consumption, cooling, and operational needs of the data centre. The requirements of the foreseen solution were put forward in a series of meetings taking place during November and December, first at PT’s headquarters in Lisbon and then through several remote teleconferences. The initial work of the project will address both the communication system for densely monitoring the data centre and the software middleware and tool for environmental monitoring and control.  

The project consortium is lead in Portugal by CISTER and in the USA by Carnegie-Mellon University, and is industrially driven by major Portuguese corporation Portugal Telecom (PT). Other academic partners are FEUP in Portugal and MIT in the USA. The SENODs project started in September 2010 and will have 3 years duration. Funding for the Portuguese academic partners is in the range of 0.3 million Euros, of which around 75% for CISTER-ISEP.