Nagoya is already working. Seznam.cz opened a second data center in Venátky nad Jizerou – News

One data center already Seznam.cz has been operating since 2015 in Prague’s Horní Počernice, its name is Kokura.

The new building in Venátky nad Jizerou, which occupies an area of ​​approximately 1,200 square meters, will now replace the capacity in the Nagano data center leased from the operator O2.

“We care about our users, that’s why we need to have the highest possible service availability. In practice, this means that if one data center fails, we need to continue to operate our services,” declared Pavel Zima, co-CEO of Seznam.cz.

He emphasized that building a new data center was a priority for the Czech Internet leader. “Our servers are key for us, we want to have full control over their operation, which is why we decided to build a second data center,” added Zima.

Seznam.cz is investing in the construction of a new data center with its own money, the amount is approximately 300 million crowns. Compared to the construction of the first Kokura data center, the cost per unit of installed power for IT has been cut in half.

By the way, the name Nagoya was created internally to keep the NG abbreviation and continue the tradition of naming data centers after Japanese cities.

The company established the tradition in 2015 under the name Kokura. According to company representatives, the name was chosen with Nagano in mind, which is already in use, and also because it contains a story of happiness.

For your interest: Nagoya is the fourth largest city in Japan, located on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in the Chubu region on the island of Honshu. It has more than 2.2 million inhabitants.

Technically, the building is very interesting. “Compared to the Kokura data center, we will have up to three MW available for IT equipment in Nagoya. The data center can accommodate over 200 server racks in two halls (systems for installing servers and other equipment – note ed.), each with an input power of up to 15 kW,” explained Vlastimil Pečínka, technical director of Seznam.cz, about the technical background of the new building.

He emphasized that Seznam.cz thinks economically and ecologically and aims for a PUE of 1.1. “This means that with the consumption of servers worth 3 MW, the total consumption of the data center is only about 3.3 MW. At the same time, the standard on the market is the PUE indicator still in the range of 1.3 to 1.5,” Pečínka calculated.

“With the design, we aimed primarily at the location of the servers that we have been developing and assembling ourselves for some time,” added Seznam’s technical director.

Nagoya boasts a very sophisticated cooling system that also takes into account the use of rainwater.

“Thanks to the large underground tank, we will use rainwater for cooling in the summer. Overall, therefore, we cool to the maximum extent with direct outdoor air passed through filters and possibly adjusted to the required humidity in limit states. This allows us to completely skip machine cooling,” he described the functionality of Pečínek.

The ceremonial knocking of the foundation stone of the building, which is located roughly three dozen kilometers beyond the border of Prague in the direction of Mlada Boleslav, took place on February 22 last year. A trial run has now been launched after about a year.

“The Seznam.cz company is our long-term partner, with whom we built the Kokura data center in 2013, and now we are completing another successful project that we have been working on for the last year,” stated Pavel Kvasnička, director of Altron’s technology division.

“Nagoja is a technologically advanced solution full of modern technologies that we have developed in our development center. These technologies will enable efficient operation from an economic and ecological point of view and will ensure the possibility of future development for the data center,” he added.

“For us, of course, it’s part of our business – having data centers and running them. We are a Czech company, so why not have data in the Czech Republic. We have them here for the long term and we plan to have them here for the long term,” concluded Zima.

The relocation of the servers from the Nagano data center will begin in mid-March with full operation, and should be completed in a month and a half – i.e. in May. As of this year, Seznam.cz has two data centers of its own (Kokura and Nagoya) with a target power of 2×3 MW and one leased one (Osaka – Stodůlky data center from O2).