Kedington Group Celebrate

Wednesday, 26th January 2011

Kedington Group Celebrate Completion Of The Development Of Research Centre

Kedington Group and Waterford Institute of Technology are delighted to announce the successful development of an energy-efficient data centre that will support the research of engineers and scientists into the future.

At any given time, the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG), part of the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT), is working on an average of 40 – 50 research and development projects designed to push the boundaries of telecommunications networking. This level of research requires technical and business expertise, and state of the art facilities that allows them to develop and test prototypes and commercialization strategies. Together with TSSG, Kedington Group have designed and implemented such a system.

"The data centre is located within the new building on the West Campus and will be able to support numerous research projects simultaneously, many dealing with cloud computing and others requiring a great deal of data crunching and advanced networking," says Jerry Horgan, Senior Systems Engineer at TSSG. "Energy efficiency was critical, but the data centre also had to be flexible, allowing for rapid reconfiguration at regular intervals as research projects changed. We started talking to Kedington about the centre’s design almost two years ago. They brought a depth of knowledge and numerous ideas around energy efficiency, physical security and flexibility" he said.

TSSG’s new Data Centre has a total IT power load of 300Kw with some cabinets engineered to house 30kw of IT equipment. Loads of that size require detailed engineering to ensure reliability, but more importantly to minimize cooling costs. Ger Kilcommons, General Manager of Kedington Munster, explained that the minimization of non IT costs, such as cooling, was critical to the overall efficiency of the centre and TSSG’s ability to compete for future research projects.

The Kedington design makes the TSSG data centre one of the most fuel efficient in Ireland. Kedington specified Rittal LCP technology which uses chilled water (at 15oC) and will provide free cooling 72% of the time.

"Considering the number of network-based research projects the data centre supports, reliability and flexibility are essential. Kedington introduced us to SYSTIMAX® iPatch® which provides a full lifecycle view of cabling network within the building," says Horgan. "The iPatch system documents, manages and monitors the physical layer network. We have a constant, comprehensive, real-time view of the physical network infrastructure, updating moves, and adds changes along with alerts that notify us of failures, identifying each problem and giving us the exact physical location. The system will enable us to minimise tool downtime and cost of repair."

The new TSSG Research Centre houses the new data centre, the official opening is January 2011.