DataGryd has announced the grand opening of its facility at 60 Hudson Street, the original Western Union Building known today as the premiere carrier hotel in North America.
The company has undergone a comprehensive infrastructure retrofit of the 80-yr-old space, replacing outdated mechanical systems and transforming the power and cooling capacity. DataGryd spans multiple floors of one of the world’s most connected buildings—situated on the crossroads of the national fiber highway—and will meet the increasing demands for high-power data processing and data storage centers in New York’s urban market, providing up to 27 megawatts of onsite power energy-efficiently.
Data traffic from text messaging, emails, financial transactions, interactive gaming, and cable TV is multiplying daily, requiring more from data centers and consequently more from the power grid.
To ease the burden on New York City’s grid, DataGryd has engineered a MicroGryd that consists of an onsite natural gas combined cooling, heating and power plant (CCHP) —designed under strict EPA guidelines—and a backup diesel generator with 26,000 gallons of fuel storage. The MicroGryd will enable overall power consumption to be reduced by up to 30 percent and will deliver significant reductions in energy usage and operating costs for customers.
The Data Center also will have the unique capacity to load-shed for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and the City, shifting utility customers’ electrical load to DataGryd’s nine megawatt cogeneration plant, diesel generators, or a combination of both.
“We’ve invested in the most innovative energy technologies on the market today – engineering a state of the art cogeneration plant onsite and planning the very first enterprise IT application of superconductor cables, which is something that sets DataGryd apart from any other urban data center. I’m looking forward to building out the white space with customers, and seeing the cogen plant in operation,” said Peter Feldman, DataGryd CEO and co-founder, who has over 20 years of experience with implementing energy-efficient technologies in collocation models.
About the Technology
Behind the state of the art CCHP plant are low-emissions Mercury 50 recuperated gas turbines manufactured by Solar Turbines that use natural gas to generate power, and a double-effect absorption chiller from Broad USA that will utilize otherwise wasted heat energy from the gas turbines to cool the Data Center. DataGryd is the first company to deploy lightweight low voltage direct current (LVDC) superconductor cables from energy industry innovator, AMSC (NASDAQ: AMSC), which will carry the same amount of current as dozens of heavy conventional copper conductors with negligible voltage drop. The unprecedented combination of energy-efficient technologies will position the center to achieve EPA CCHP and Energy Star certifications once in operation.
“Data centers are often forced to design around the limitations of heavy conventional copper supply cables that must be restricted in length because of voltage drop requirements. By eliminating the limitations of copper, superconductor cables carry massive amounts of power at low voltage, with near perfect efficiency, and can provide significant economic benefits in the layout and design of data centers,” said Jack McCall, managing director of AMSC’s Superconductor Power Systems. “Data centers are facing huge challenges in meeting ever increasing power requirements, and DataGryd is really pushing the envelope to see how energy and space-efficient a data center can be.”
DataGryd customers will have the ability to design their own data center whitespace, with help from DataGryd to maximize their utilization of the MicoGryd shell. Equipment-ready facilities can be delivered in any power configuration, sub-divided in almost any footprint, and power and cooling can be added as customer needs grow. N+1 redundancy will be standard.
