Hitachi Enlarges Japan Facility

Hitachi Group announced on Thursday it is commemorating next week’s Earth Day by expanding its green data center in Yokohama, Japan.

The new wing will present technological enhancements that are part of the company’s general CoolCenter50 project, which aims to decrease power consumption in Hitachi’s Yokohama and Okayama facility by 50 percent in five years.

The expansion is furthermore part of the company’s corporate wide Harmonious Green Plan, announced last November, which attempts to reduce 330,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2012 through different green IT products.

Hitachi’s green data center design will use its own software and hardware ideas relating to the green IT, including storage virtualization and thin provisioning, data de-duplication software and its “ecology” server.

The Hitachi data center includes a 3-D thermal hydraulic simulator dubbed AirAssist, which helps optimize hardware layout and cooling placement. The new air-conditioning controller enables it to more efficiently meet the load requirements of the diverse servers and storage devices in the facility.

Other features comprise accommodations for direct current power supplies and water-cooled servers and racks, as well as a rooftop garden that will help with achieving the nighttime cooling requirements by reducing indoor temperatures.

The new data center addition is projected to be up and running by July 2009. Hitachi says it expects its overall Power Usage Effectiveness measure to come in at 1.6 or lower.