The wait is over! We’re thrilled to share that Building 1 of our brand-new data center is up and running. Here’s an inside look at all the features that make Hub Europe the most reliable data center in the Contabo family.
Hub Europe: Home for 50,000 Servers
Hub Europe Data Center Park covers 25,600 square meters, which is roughly 4 football pitches. The data center park will include up to 6 buildings with a total IT load of 9.6 MW. This means we can host up to 50,000 physical servers here. It was designed with N+1 redundancy to reach yearly availability of minimum 99.982% required for Tier 3 data centers.
Each building is independently connected to power grid and internet, and has a separate cooling system and secondary power system including UPS and diesel generator. Servers are stored in 2 server rooms, with each room holding ten rows of server racks.
Centrally Located with Premium Connectivity in Mind
Hub Europe sits in a prime location, chosen to provide great connectivity across Europe and worldwide. It’s equipped with two fiber optic lines leading to the North and to the South into two different internet exchange points. We also contracted two different Tier 1 uplink providers with each providing two redundant 100 Gigabit lines. These lines will be extended as the traffic increases.
This setup guarantees continuous internet connectivity, even if one physical uplink goes down or if one uplink provider experiences issues, as well as excellent latency across Europe. You can see below an outline of ping times from the new data center to key locations worldwide.
Experienced Team on Site
We have put together a team of seasoned professionals led by a manager with 20+ years of experience in data center operations. The team members have been working together for over a decade and have offices on-site, so as to be ready to react 24/7.
Redundant Power Connection
The data center park is located 200 meters away from a power transformer station. This ensures a stable and reliable power supply from the public grid. Two separate power lines have been built to provide redundancies.
We follow the same level of redundancy all the way from high-voltage transformers down to the server racks. In the unlikely event that both power lines are out, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and diesel generator ensure alternative power supply for days.
Before the launch we performed extensive load bank testing. We used load banks to generate artificial IT load to ensure that the Building 1 works seamlessly at the designed capacity of 1.6 MW.
Resilient Cooling System
The cooling system is based on direct-free-cooling. In this system the cool air flows through the raised floor and the cold aisles into the racks while the hot air generated by the servers is exhausted into the hot aisles. Then the hot air moves up and then gets pushed outside the building. The roof slope allows for extra space for the hot air away from the servers.
This method minimizes the power needed for mechanical ventilation and allows for outside air to be used for cooling for 6-8 months each year. If the outside temperatures aren’t low enough to ensure proper cooling, 36 compressors step in to maintain a safe temperature for the servers. Overall, this reduces energy usage by up to 60% compared to a setup where mechanical ventilation and cooling needs to be used on a constant basis.
There are also several additional benefits to this system, as there are fewer moving parts, lower operational and maintenance costs. This allows us to keep great prices even when the other costs are increasing.
As a consequence, Hub Europe has a design Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.168, which makes it one of the most energy-efficient data centers park in Europe. PUE is a global standard that shows how much electricity is needed to run a certain amount of IT load. In our case this means that to run servers consuming 1 kW we need 1.168 kW, with the remaining 0.1168 kW going predominantly into cooling.
100% Green Energy
We are not only optimizing the amount of power we need. We also took care of where it comes from. Hub Europe is powered by 100% carbon free energy. What’s more; we’ve installed photovoltaic panels on each building, amounting to a total of more than 300 kWp (kilowatts peak rating). This further reduces our environmental impact and makes it possible to safeguard our low prices for our customers. We are in the process of obtaining ISO 50001 certification proving the energy efficiency of this data center park.
Hub Europe: Keeping Your Instances Safe
Safety is our top priority, so we did our best to protect your data and our infrastructure against various risks. Before starting construction, we performed an extensive study on potential natural disasters risk in the area. Based on the results, we put in place several preventative measures.
Our data center is equipped with fire alarm and nitrogen fire extinguishers that activate immediately if needed. Fireproof doors are installed to prevent fire from spreading between server rooms.
We have raised the floor by 1.2 m and installed a high-performance pump to ensure that the entire site can withstand a 300-year flood. Flood gates are also available on site for swift installation, should it be necessary. This is on top of the regular flood prevention measures planned by the local government.
Lightning protection is also done according to international standards.
Several state-of-art physical security measures are in place; however, we shall keep those to ourselves for, well… security reasons :).
What’s Next for Hub Europe?
Building 1 is already fully operational and already serving customers with over 20,000 instances running as of time of writing. Buildings 2 and 3 are planned to come online in 2025 (Q1 and Q3 respectively).
This is a new and exciting chapter for Contabo. With Hub Europe our customers will experience more stable performance and better redundancy for the same wallet-friendly price. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook for more updates as we move forward with this project.