Photo Tour: Iliad’s DC3 Data Center on Paris Outskirts
Provider scales data center using massive factory-manufactured metal rooms
![Photo Tour: Iliad’s DC3 Data Center on Paris Outskirts Photo Tour: Iliad’s DC3 Data Center on Paris Outskirts](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt8eb3cdfc1fce5194/blt0d4b70099d7ed79c/6621220cae9fb20196bdfdf1/Iliad-DC3-Daily-Motion-pod.jpg?width=1280&auto=webp&quality=95&format=jpg&disable=upscale)
Paris is a good place to run a data center business. It is a major European business center, but unlike other European business centers, electricity there is relatively cheap, because France’s predominantly nuclear generation has ensured an abundance of energy.
The city’s extensive underground sewer system, famous for its role in the French Revolution and World War II and described by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, has also been used to build out fiber network infrastructure, so connectivity in the city is abundant as well.
One of the biggest data center providers in Paris is Iliad SA, better known for being one of the country’s largest telcos. But it also has a sizable hosting and colocation business, with two large data centers in and around Paris and a nascent bare-metal cloud service, offering on-demand ARM-powered servers.
Iliad’s data center business is run by Arnaud de Bermingham, CEO of the company’s hosting division called Online.net. de Bermingham, who came up with the standard data center design the company now uses across its footprint, gave Data Center Knowledge a tour of one of the facilities in November.
Arnaud de Bermingham, CEO of Online.net, in front of an Eaton UPS unit at Iliad's DC3
Huge Fire-Containing Data Center Modules
Iliad’s 25-megawatt DC3 data center, located in Vitry-sur-Seine, a Paris suburb just south of the city, was built about two years ago. It is one of two data centers in the country and the only hosting data center in the country to have received Uptime Institute’s Tier III certification for design documents. No data center in France has received Tier certification for constructed facility.
The hosting data center has several unique features, one of which is the use of massive metal rooms as a way to build out capacity.
The big metal boxes are manufactured at a factory and shipped to the building for assembly. Each box has its own electrical and mechanical infrastructure. One of the benefits of this approach is fire containment. If there is a fire, the metal walls will isolate it for up to two hours, de Bermingham said.
Each room has capacity for about 350 kW and 132 IT racks and takes six weeks to fit out. It has four IT power loops and two cooling power loops. Each of the IT loops cannot be loaded to more than 75 percent of capacity, so if one goes down, the remaining three can pick up the load. This four-and-two setup is what gives the data center concurrent maintainability, the all-important standard required for Tier III certification.
Another unique feature is concrete-encased electrical busway, which is another fire-avoidance measure.
Encasing electrical busway in concrete is a design feature de Bermingham came up with to enhance fire protection
The data center's cooling capacity is adjusted automatically based on the amount of power consumed (power meters pictured)
UPS and transfer switches serving one of the big data halls at Illiad's DC3
The data center relies primarily on mechanical cooling but does use free cooling about 30 percent of the year, according to de Bermingham
Cold-aisle isolation: a fairly standard feature in modern data centers
While Iliad is a connectivity services provider itself, it does not provide bandwidth to its data center customers, keeping its colocation and hosting business carrier-neutral
Room to Grow
There is enough space and power to add two more big rooms at the site. The company also plans to build out DC4, an undeveloped building it owns in Paris proper. That building has a nuclear bunker.
The Online.net cloud was launched only recently and currently lives in DC2, an older facility in Vitry-sur-Seine. If demand for its cloud services grows, the company will expand the infrastructure to other locations, including the U.S.
While there is a building called DC1 in Iliad’s portfolio – the facility used to belong to Exodus Communications, the colocation company that went out of business following the dot-com bust of the late 90s – the building currently sits unused.
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