Future Facilities helps with France’s First Tier IV Colocation Data Center – Thésée DataCenter

Future Facilities’ 6Sigma Digital Twin solution has been employed by Thésée DataCenter, both in the design and ongoing operational running of its Tier IV-certified French data center. The colocation facility has focused its efforts on providing an energy efficient customer offering, geared for a mixed-density national and international customer base, with ultimate transparency between itself and its customers. Thésée DataCenter will offer a ground-breaking colocation ‘home-away-from-home’ data center experience to its customers. 

The 6Sigma Digital Twin has been integrated with New Generation’s Nuvea Paas Web Portal platform, as well as the DCMS and BMS systems, to offer an end-to-end view for the customer.  

Pascal Lecoq, Worldwide Practice Director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise explains: “Customers will have access to real-time data through a service portal – they will have a single-pane-of-glass access to all their dashboards and intelligent reports, and a 3D view of their computer room. This will show all operating parameters of what is occurring at each specific second in their data center environment. It will be like they are in the room.” 

Commenting on the system integration, Gilles Cieza, CEO of New Generation added: “We started out together with the observation that the DCIM solutions on the market only covered part of the challenges that data center operators were facing, and New Generation then had an integrated platform that allowed for the overall management of a data center by reconciling the DCIM and DCSO (Operations Optimization) 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 optimize the rooms capacity, to simulate interventions by validating the feasibility a priori, etc.” 

Thésée DataCenter’s campus will eventually offer six data center buildings, each housing two identical data halls of 534 square meters commissioned in three phases of 1MW, 2MW and 3MW IT capacity build out. Specializing in offering mixed density from legacy to cloud hyper-converged to HPC computing, the focus will be on high performance with minimal environmental impact and maximum energy efficiency. The data center is built on a modular design masterminded by HPE Data Center Technology Services, with the ability to upscale quickly without disruption to meet customer demand, whilst maintaining efficiency in the meantime.  

It will minimize environmental impact with unprecedented energy performance via a three-level cooling solution using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to optimize 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 data center will be well-placed to cater to a range of customer rack densities. 

Using a Data Center Digital Twin in Design 

With design masterminded by HPE, both HPE and Thésée DataCenter agreed that Future Facilities’ 6SigmaDCX product suite was invaluable in vetting the design of the data center before build-out, to ensure that both parties were satisfied it would function as expected.  

Eric Arbaretaz, CTO and Co-Founder, Thésée DataCenter comments, “CFD modeling helped us to optimise the space management and to check/validate at each step of design if the cooling system was ok with the requirements – bringing the right level of cooling to all the different parts of the computer room according to the density of the rack and according to various levels of capacity.” 

Pascal Lecoq, Worldwide Practice Director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise concurs, “We didn’t even look at another solution because we know 6SigmaDCX suite very well. We knew we wanted to use it as a CFD modelling toolset for the design phase, but when we looked with our partner New Generation about how to integrate the customer portal, it came naturally that the 6Sigma Digital Twin was the best fit in terms of integration capabilities as well, to use in our DCMS. It also offered the capability to split a data hall into sections so that customer X sees only their own racks – not customer Y’s racks, which is very important in terms of security. The product’s Library element was also crucial; it has the largest library on the market.” 

Maximising Operational Efficiency for Thésée DataCenter and its End-Customers  

Thésée DataCenter will maintain an accurate, up-to-date data center digital twin of each of its data halls via the 6Sigma Digital Twin solution to ensure power, cooling, weight and capacity management are optimized. This will be used to make informed decisions of IT deployment for both itself and its customers.  

Eric Arbaretaz, CTO and Co-Founder, Thésée DataCenter, comments, “We will use the 6Sigma Digital Twin for each change, both in pre-sales and in capacity planning. The tool will enable us to analyze, 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 center and its customers. 

Pascal Lecoq, Worldwide Practice Director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise further explains, “The integration of the 6Sigma Digital Twin is important to give both Thésée DataCenter and its customers a real-time vision of their own environment from IT to facilities – in terms of what is occurring at any time in their data hall, in their information system, and then everything pertaining to intelligent reports, dashboards but also simulation scenarios – what-if scenarios.”  

Dave King, Product Manager at Future Facilities added, "We are delighted to see the 6Sigma Digital Twin integrated into the DCMS by HPE and New Generation to enable Thésée DataCenter to offer an innovative experience to its customers.”