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J UNE 2015 | 79 MTS Data Centre PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY MTS ALLSTREAM MTS Data Centre by GODFREY BUDD T he first purpose-built colocation data centre in Manitoba, which opens this summer, could mark the beginnings of an emerging new sector for the province. Clad with pre-finished panels in grey and white, the 45-foot, two-storey MTS Data Centre – with floor-to-ceiling heights of about 22 feet – sits well back from the street, in a Winnipeg indus- trial park. The design accommodates a future doubling in size of the new Manitoba Telecom Services Inc. facility on the site. MTS anticipates growth in the data cen- tre sector as a whole for the province of Manitoba. "There's likely going to be an expanded need for these types of facili- ties. The demand is due to businesses' increased reliance on IT," says Ryan Klassen, general manager at MTS. The provincial government, he adds, sees data storage as a potential growth area for the local economy, and Manitoba as a good location for the types of facilities required. "It has low-cost green power [from hydro-electricity], a cold climate and is geologically stable," says Klassen. The cooling system for the build- ing takes advantage of the region's cold climate by using free cooling air. "The estimated decrease in energ y consumption for cooling is up to 70 per cent, based on industry averages in the U.S.," explains Klassen. The new Data Centre has been awarded an Uptime Institute Tier III design certification. This means that the Data Centre infrastructure is concur- rently maintainable while fully opera- tional and has built-in redundancies for power and cooling, allowing for servicing of any infrastructure component without impacting IT operations. The Centre also has the ability to generate its own con- tinuous power to maintain all operations if utility power is interrupted. Electrical power could be described as the dominant characteristic of mod- ern data centres. "With a data centre, well over half the cost and the area is do with electricity," says Vello Ehvert, president of Ehvert Mission Critical, which designs, builds and operates data centres and other IT infrastructure and is the designer/builder of this facility. Besides the predominant role of elec- trical power, some other features of data centres help form, perhaps, a unique cluster of attributes. The huge amount of heat generated by banks of computers has to be removed; connectivity to the Internet has to be lightning quick, way faster than for most buildings; and their availability to provide service must be constant, like a hospital ICU, except there is no room for shutdowns. "Data centres are more like power plants than offices," Ehvert says. There are four generators at the facility. Should power from the grid fail and stay down for a while, the new data centre could run on three genera- tors, while the fourth is being serviced. "So energy efficiency is very important. Electrical consumption could be 20, 50, even 100 times more power per square foot compared to a regular office tower. The white space, aka the location of the servers themselves, accounts for about 25 to 30 per cent of the space used, while about 70 per cent is taken up with power, cooling, security, fire suppression, as well as an office for people [inside] and generators outside," he says. The building has almost no win- dows, except for some offices on the ground floor, where a staff of roughly 20 people work. The design has deployed several strat- egies to mitigate power consumption. The chilled water system can operate at elevated temperatures, while server rooms are somewhat warmer than a typical office. Also, Ehvert says that computer-heated air goes directly into the air conditioning system and is not released back into server rooms. "The free cooling system, which allows us to not run the outside compressors in win- ter, means that compressors are run only on the hottest days," Ehvert explains. The structural heft of the build- ing is something of an outlier, even for a data centre. Ehvert says that the load-bearing capacity for many exist- ing data centres is around 150-pounds per square foot, but that the MTS Data Centre's floors are built for 250-pounds per square foot. "We believe that looking five to 10 years out, we will need more power and greater structural strength requirements," Ehvert says. A structural ceiling grid that acts as a kind of beefed-up suspended T-bar sys- tem can accommodate additional pieces of equipment being attached to it. Like many buildings in the Winnipeg area, the new Data Centre, for founda- tional stability, relied on piles driven down to refusal – about 15 metres. Besides 250-pound per square foot load capacity, the design also called for large, clear interior spans. "In one direction, the spans were 34 feet, in the other, they were 25. Because of the need for long spans, we used a composite floor system – a concrete topping on a metal deck, supported by steel beams with Nelson LOCATION 1450 Waverley Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba OWNER/DEVELOPER Manitoba Telecom Services Inc. (MTS) ARCHITECT (LEAD)/GENERAL CONTRACTOR/MECHANICAL/ ELECTRICAL CONSULTANT Ehvert Mission Critical ARCHITECT (ENVELOPE) Number TEN Architectural Group STRUCTURAL CONSULTANT Crosier Kilgour & Partners Ltd. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT HTFC Planning & Design TOTAL AREA 64,000 square feet CONSTRUCTION COST $53 million

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