Schneider Electric helps Taiwan Highway Bureau build a state-of-the-art green data center

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Taiwan Highway Bureau’s (THB) primary missions are planning, construction, and maintenance of all the highways across the country. Meanwhile, it also helps to manage registration and monitoring of all vehicles, driving licenses, and transportation industry nationwide.

With more than 6000 staff, with an aging IDC infrastructure in THB’s old headquarters was quickly becoming obsolete and could not meet the ever-growing requirements for more IT applications and data processing. Under this pretext, the IT division decided to build a new data center that could satisfy IT needs for the next 20 years to come.

Green technologies from the outset

“At first, we planned to renew the current IDC inside the old headquarters building, but later we gave up due to restricted power supply and insufficient stress-resistance of the current flooring, constrained by the design of the building,” pointed out Mr. Chen Shouqiang, Director of THB’s IT Division. “So we decided to build a whole new IDC inside a new THB office building.”

To be in line with the government’s energy-saving and carbon-footprint-reduction policy, THB tower has adopted several green technologies from the design stage. Given this background, the IT division decided to build a green IDC with a PUE value of 1.8 and to provide a variety of Internet services with virtualization technology. When THB’s IT division began to survey green IDC possibilities, they decided to attract both domestic and foreign vendors to bid together through open tender. In the end, they chose Schneider Electric.

The key differentiator

To build an energy-saving and safe green IDC is no easy task. There are many details that we need to take into account, for example, the cooling capacity, piping, and wiring, communications with electricians on-site, etc. In case of an unexpected problem, the project management team needs to be able to identify the root cause and come up with a solution in a very short time.

The key differentiator of Schneider Electric from other competitors is their capability to provide a comprehensive data center product portfolio, their rich experience in designing and building IDCs around the world as well as their technology to visualize the infrastructure and environment for the future, such as piping, airflow, etc. with 3D animation software. “We were hopeful that THB-IDC would become a role model for other government IDC projects,” Chen explained.

Comprehensive solutions for the future

With our new IDC, staff can monitor in real time all the internet equipment, power, cooling, CCTW, and fire suppression systems in its monitor room. It is equipped with VESDA and FM200 fire suppression system, and its UPS system provides up to 50 minutes of back-up time. “In past tenders, due to price issues, different systems had to be provided by different vendors,” said Chen. “But in the end, integration of all these different systems was solved. Schneider Electric provided a comprehensive IDC product portfolio so our IT division can solve all issues through one single window.”

Real-time monitoring on a single platform

“THB is very pleased with its new state-of-the-art, high-efficiency green data center, and with the cooperation and expertise of Schneider Electric, we launched operations in March of 2014 and Schneider Electric helped us to finish the project on schedule,” Chen adds. Now Its operators can do real-time monitoring of PUE and other systems such as IT equipment, power, cooling, and CCTV all integrated together in a single DCIM platform.”

Go further with THB’s data center story by accessing the full case study here