Client Story: Lamda Hellix

"Building to a design and certifying the build with Uptime Institute provides a world-class level of confidence to Lamda Hellix’s clients and partners showing all elements of the critical infrastructure of Athens-2 are capable of unmatched performance even under duress. We are extremely proud of this significant certification because it clearly demonstrates the exceptional design & infrastructure along the building characteristics, and the extremely low site risks of Athens-2."

Apostolos Kakkos
Chairman & CEO
Lamda Hellix

Overview

Lamda Hellix is a leading data center services provider, successfully operating for the past 16 years with zero downtime, and one of the largest state-of-the-art data center campuses in Southeast Europe, Middle East and South Africa. It is the main regional Neutral data center services provider offering a comprehensive portfolio of services including Colocation, Cloud, Business Continuity, Data Center Operation, IT Managed Services, Consulting & Integration. The goal of Lamda Hellix’s services is to help customers increase safety and availability of their mission-critical applications, while maintaining the same level of autonomy and independence they would experience with a fully owned infrastructure. Strategically located in between three continents, Athens Data Center Campus is one of the major digital hubs in the SE Mediterranean. Lamda Helllix’s Campus has two innovative data centers, Athens-1 and Athens-2, which meets all international standards and has received numerous international awards for excellent design, infrastructure as well as for green operation (Uptime Institute Tier III Design & Constructed Facility, and USGBC LEED v4 Gold O+M & BD+C Certifications). In fact, Athens-2 was awarded the “Best Service Provider Data Center in EMEA” by Data Center Dynamics in its first year of operation.

Lamda Hellix worked closely with Uptime Institute since the design phase of Athens-2 to ensure that the facility upheld the standards necessary for certification. The Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility for Athens-2 ensures that the Facility has been constructed as designed, verifying that can meet all the defined availability requirements. The Tier III certification was granted after a week of evaluations and rigorous live system demonstrations in real world conditions by Uptime Institute engineers, validating performance according to the Tier III objectives. Lamda Hellix’s goal was to create a cutting-edge data center compliant with all international standards and requirements addressing the high demand in the region for data center services.

Athens-2 Tier Certification demonstrations were completed successfully with all systems meeting Tier requirements the first time without any delay or need for remediation. What the company learned was that the success originated from how well the team was prepared for Tier Certification. The Lamda Hellix Operation, design and construction team worked hard to put together all the operating procedures required to accomplish the demonstrations including a detailed schedule with timing and information on how to perform the demonstrations. The team also arranged to have the appropriate technical staff on site and practiced and rehearsed all demonstrations prior to the Uptime Institute assessment. The solid preparation put Lamda Hellix in a far better position to manage and perform the Tier Certification demonstrations successfully, ensuring that the Athens 2 Data Center realized its full potential.

One of the keys to success relied on the comprehensive commissioning program that was completed during initial buildout, and all infrastructure components and systems were rigorously tested, thus ensuring that the Data Center performed as designed. All maintenance and failure scenarios were thoroughly tested, and all problems observed in Facility’s performance were identified and remediated early before the Tier Certification process.

Opportunity

Lamda Hellix strives to stay one step ahead of customer demands and market changes. As such, continuous investment remains part of the company’s strategic plans. Lamda Hellix’s investment plans fall into three major pillars: Infrastructure upgrade; Digital transformation of operations; and Services portfolio expansion. The company has invested a significant amount of time and capital to remain competitive to the benefit of its customers.

For the expansion of the services portfolio, Lamda Hellix recently expanded the Hybrid Cloud and IT Managed Services portfolio. The company invested in the installation and deployment of the Azure Stack in the Data Center campus, which allows customers to run their Azure services through the data center campus and store their data in Greece which is obligatory for many industries because of regulatory framework. A team of experts is available 24x7 to support customers and guide them through the process of migration and services selection of Microsoft Azure platform.

“In late 2015, Athens-2 received the Best Service Provider Data Center in EMEA award from Data Center Dynamics for its Tier III certified design and LEED BD+C Gold build. Athens-2 is the first data center in South-East Europe with Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility, which clearly illustrates Lamda Hellix’s commitment to excellence in data center services. Athens-2 was also the first DC in the world for achieving LEED Gold certification.”

Apostolos Kakkos
Chairman & CEO
Lamda Hellix

Solution

The first data center, Athens-1, was launched in 2003 and holds a record of 100% availability and has achieved remarkable energy savings and is still at the edge of technology with expansions and capacity upgrades implemented. It is the first data center in the world certified for its green operation with LEED v4 Gold in 2016.

Athens-2 was designed to minimize its carbon footprint and reduce energy consumption. For cooling, Lamda Hellix ran simulation models based on the temperatures of the last 5 years. Through this process, the company managed to identify the optimum level of performance and achieve an outstanding PUE rate for the Greek climate.

The vision to build a resource efficient Data Center using less water, energy and reduces greenhouse emissions was important to the company. The cooling infrastructure, which is responsible for about 40% of the energy consumption in Data Centers, Lamda Hellix invested substantial resources during the selection process to ensure the identification of the optimum solution. Specifically, an energy efficiency analysis was developed in order to run and evaluate different cooling solutions and study different configurations to identify those that deliver the optimum overall performance.

Sustainable Data Center cooling design incorporates:

Extra High Efficiency Chillers
Adoption of Dry-Coolers for free cooling in a wide range of ambient temperature
Installation of evaporative Cooling pads for chillers’ efficiency optimization at high ambient temperatures
Extra high efficiency chilled water close control units

The Sustainable Data Center power infrastructure design incorporates modular, flexible blocks of equipment to provide resources where and when they are needed rather than relying on over-provisioning to meet operational requirements.

The Uptime Institute Tier assessment provided the Operations team with plenty of opportunities to work in a very close collaboration with Uptime Institute experts to recommission all power and cooling systems, double check process and procedures and optimize them if necessary. By the end of Tier Certification, the Operations team took all the lessons learned and knowledge gained from the assessment to finalize the Maintenance and Operations program and make sure that the procedures (SOPs, MOPs, EOPs) have all the information they need to effectively operate for the upcoming years.

Athens-3 is the next major expansion project of Lamda Hellix infrastructure and is already becoming a reality. The completion timeframe will depend on the commercialization and is anticipated to be operational within the next 2 years.

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