Thésée DataCenter has launched its new French colocation offering, working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Future Facilities and New Generation to create an innovative colocation customer experience.
Thésée DataCenter delivers a groundbreaking colocation home-away-from-home data centre experience after working in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Future Facilities, Watt Design and New Generation. Using end-to-end systems integration through an innovative Data Centre Manager System (DCMS) with digital twin technology embedded, the colocation provider’s end-customers will have complete real-time 3D visibility of their data centre space via a web portal.
This method offers unprecedented, world-class levels of transparency and customer experience to colocation customers for the first time. Coupled with a three-level cooling solution to optimise energy performance and modular scalable design, this framework presents an innovative colocation offering like no other.
Masterminded by HPE Data Center Technology Services, the design of Thésée’s data centre will focus on offering high availability, minimal environmental impact and unprecedented energy performance with service tailored to the mixed density needs of the 2020-2030 decade – from 5kW to 30kW per rack to accommodate modern customer user cases.
Thésée DataCenter launches its groundbreaking colocation facility with several industry firsts. These include:
- It is the first Tier IV Uptime-certified colocation data centre in France and will eventually offer six data centre buildings, each housing two identical data halls of 534m² commissioned in three phases of 1MW, 2MW and 3MW IT capacity build-out.
- It is built on a modular design masterminded by HPE with the ability to upscale quickly without disruption to meet customer demand, while maintaining efficiency in the meantime.
- It will offer its end-customers access to detailed data centre metrics on their space via a web portal. This will include extensive reporting functionality and real-time performance dashboards, as well as access to BMS event and alarm monitoring through the portal. This is powered by the New Generation Nuvea PaaS web service portal and fed with information from Future Facilities’ 6Sigma Digital Twin solution as well as the Building Management System (BMS).
- It will minimise environmental impact with unprecedented energy performance via a three-level cooling solution using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to optimise each individual Air Handling Unit. Using a combination of indirect air free cooling as the main cooling source, combined with an adiabatic system and alternative chilled water system as an ultimate source, the cooling system allows the colocation provider to cater to a range of densities while offering the ultimate in energy efficiency. This makes it a greener data centre offering with lower energy costs which will be passed on to the end-customer.
- Thésée DataCenter will maintain an accurate, up-to-date data centre digital twin via the 6Sigma Digital Twin solution from Future Facilities to ensure power, cooling, weight and capacity management are optimised. This will be used to make informed decisions of IT deployment for both itself and its customers.
- End-customers will have the ability to see a 3D model of their data centre space and use CFD simulation to inform their IT strategy and deployment on an ongoing day-to-day operational basis. This promotes transparency between the colocation provider and their customer, enabling a collaborative environment where both colocation provider and end-customer can maximise use of their data centre space.
Eric Arbaretaz, CTO and Co-founder, Thésée DataCenter, said: “Thésée DataCenter aims to offer the best combination of qualities currently sought by customers: a sovereign, eco-responsible data centre offering the best level of security and availability at a competitive price.
“We guarantee an energy bill 30% lower than most current offers, bearing in mind that this consumption can represent more than half the cost of hosting in the case of high density (private cloud and/or HPC hosting for example). The environmental impact is also considerably improved and carbon emissions are guaranteed to be reduced in the same proportions. The guarantee of this level of energy efficiency has been validated in the design phase in the 6Sigma Digital Twin and will be supported in the operational phase by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that will constantly adapt the operating conditions to the weather conditions and the behaviour of the IT equipment.”
The Data Centre Management System design
Thésée DataCenter counts both innovative and influential French and international companies among its clientele, attracted by the unique customer experience that Thésée DataCenter offers, with some key players already moving into its new data centre space. The Data Centre Management System (DCMS) serves to integrate previously separate areas into a unified, efficient management system accessed via a web portal.
Gilles Cieza, CEO of New Generation, said: “We started out together with the observation that the DCIM solutions on the market only covered part of the challenges that data centre operators were facing, and New Generation then had an integrated platform that allowed for the overall management of a data centre by reconciling the DCIM and DCSO (Operations Optimisation) components, which was a perfect match for the DCMS concept. The 6Sigma Digital Twin is an important component of the DCMS solution since it allows, through a very accurate model of the rooms, to manage equipment inventories, to plan and optimise the rooms, to simulate interventions by validating the feasibility a priori, etc.”
Reiterating the importance of digital twin technology, Thésée DataCenter’s Eric Arbaretaz concurs: “We will use the 6Sigma Digital Twin for each change, both in pre-sales and in capacity planning. The tool will enable us to analyse, model and test future scenarios for the evolution of the IT room to offer a risk-free environment for our customers, make maximum use of the site’s capacity, anticipate changes to the air conditioning infrastructure, which is modular, and achieve our very ambitious energy performance objectives (PUE 1.2). This is why, in my opinion, the 6Sigma Digital Twin is an essential tool in the communication between the data centre and its customers.
“The 6SigmaAccess solution makes the relationship between the hosting company and its customers more fluid and allows capacity planning decisions to be based on ‘scientific’ analyses, thus reducing the risk of breakdowns while simultaneously reducing the carbon footprint and energy consumption and keeping costs under control. And all this without the need for customers to travel to the site, which is a real asset for customers hosted by Thésée DataCenter.”
Commenting on the overall design of Thésée DataCenter, Pascal Lecoq, Worldwide Practice Director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, details the thought process behind the design: “We designed Thésée DataCenter with four key considerations in mind: 1. It caters for a range of densities from legacy to cloud hyperconverged, to HPC computing to accommodate modern customer user cases; 2. It has best-in-class high availability (Tier IV was essential); 3. It has a modularity and granularity that makes it agile and flexible by design; 4. Energy efficiency with average PUE of 1.2 (max 1.3 during the summer at full capacity). In fact, we’ve got only IT infrastructure and network interconnect inside the data centre shell – everything pertaining to facilities is outside; the design is modular to be incremented and upgraded really easily. Thésée DataCenter is far away leading the scene in terms of data centre design for colocation data centres in France.”
