Boston – Fidelity Investments (Fidelity) and Integrated Design Group (ID) announced today that their design of Centercore, an off-site fabricated enterprise data center, has been recognized with two industry awards for innovation and design excellence. Centercore has been recognized as the 2013 CoreNet Global Industry Excellence Award winner, and is the DatacenterDynamics 2013 winner of its ‘Innovation in the Medium Data Center’ category.
ID was selected by Fidelity to design and engineer a scalable data center that would increase operational efficiency while reducing costs. Providing load-on-demand capacity appealed to Fidelity’s business objectives and reduced upfront capital outlay. The end result is a facility that looks and operates like a traditional data center hall but can be rapidly deployed to meet capacity demand.
“This is a way we can deploy capital in an entirely new way, with flexibility, better efficiency and more adaptability to future technology changes,” said Joe Higgins, vice president of engineering and corporate sustainability officer at Fidelity, in a presentation at Open Compute. “The CIOs that have gone through this innovation were absolutely blown away.”
Fidelity approached ID in 2011 with an idea to develop its own custom off-site fabricated data center solution, and ID helped Fidelity bring this idea from concept through to a successful proof of concept. The prototype, built adjacent to Fidelity’s existing data center at Research Triangle Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, was successfully constructed in 2012 and the next generation is reaching the market in 2013. Much more than a modular solution, Centercore is a resilient and scalable off-site constructed kit of parts that is shipped to the site and assembled, enabling an accelerated project delivery and mitigating project risk due to weather or unforeseen site conditions.
“Integrated Design Group thrives on providing innovative solutions to complex challenges. Centercore was a true collaboration with Fidelity and its partners and we are very proud of the results,” said John T. Moran, LEED AP, project manager at ID. “We have been integrating architecture and engineering solutions for mission critical clients since our founding a decade ago. We are honored that Centercore has been recognized for design excellence and we look forward to continuing our work with Fidelity on this exciting initiative.”
Centercore was recognized by CoreNet Global as the 2013 Industry Excellence Award winner. Industry Excellence is described as a management practice and work process that leads to world-class, superior performance and delivers a desired, measurable, and sustained result. Judges were representatives from Unilever, Thomson Reuters, Merck and Intel. DatacenterDynamics North American Awards recognize the very best innovation, leadership and different thinking in the data center industry across the North American region. Centercore was selected as the ‘Innovation in the Medium-Data Center’ category. The awards program provides firms a chance to showcase professionalism and ingenuity in the data center industry.
Integrated Design Group is also collaborating with Fidelity on its newest project in Omaha, Nebraska, an 80,000 SF datacenter that incorporates the next generation Centercore design, as well as several innovative features including a vegetated roof, and cooling supplemented by an onsite aquifer.