SELECTEL ANNOUNCES NEW 20MW DATA CENTRE CONSTRUCTION

PRESS RELEASE: Selectel is building a new data centre with an area of ​​4.5 thousand square meters. It will house 2,000 racks for 80,000 servers. The construction is taking place against the backdrop of an acute shortage of rack spaces in the capital. The company believes that the market situation is not as bad as it is presented. Investments in the project are estimated at billions of roubles. At the same time, Selectel plans to expand existing data centres, as well as look for places for new ones.

 

New data centre in Moscow

As it became known to CNews, Selectel, a provider of cloud infrastructure and data centre services, is building a huge data processing centre (DPC) in Moscow. The company plans to place 2,000 server racks for 80,000 servers. Aleksey Eremenko , director of infrastructure at Selectel , told this publication.

In the new data centre called Yurlovsky, all racks will be placed in one room with an area of ​​4.5 thousand square meters. m, says Eremenko. He emphasises that this is the largest server room in Russia. The data centre is designed taking into account the needs of the market and is aimed at providing IaaS services and colocation services. For comparison, the largest data centre in Russia, which is being built by Sberbank, is designed for 3.5 thousand server racks. This volume is comparable to the number of racks declared by Selectel.

At the current stage, the commissioning of the facility is scheduled for 2023, however, the terms may be adjusted by the provider depending on the market situation. Aleksey Eremenko estimated investments in the project at billions of roubles, he did not name the exact amount.

It is worth noting that these are not the only investments in the construction of data centres that are being invested in Selectel. The infrastructure director told CNews that the company is developing simultaneously on three sites. This implies the expansion of existing data centres in Moscow, St. Petersburg and the region. Also at the beginning of 2022, the company was looking for new sites for the construction of additional data centres, in addition to Yurlovsky.

 

Data centre equipment

Selectel uses both off-the-shelf server hardware and itself assembles servers from parts purchased from individual vendors.

“We do what is in demand on the market, only on our own platform,” Alexey Eremenko answered CNews when asked about the use of Russian processors in the company's equipment.

 

“And if suddenly, for some reason, our customers want to use domestic processors in large numbers tomorrow, we will immediately introduce them. But buying those processors that customers do not need does not make sense.”

 

As they explained to Selectel, there will be enough server hardware until October 2022. “But we already understand the logistics chains and processes, how the equipment comes and will come in order to develop further,” says Alexey Eremenko.

He noted that Selectel uses legal, white routes in order to ensure the development of the company not only today, but also in the future.

Selectel plans to decide where to purchase server and engineering equipment for the new data centre at the end of 2022.

 

Data centre details

The total input power of the data centre will be 20 MW, the average power per rack is 8 kW, Selectel notes. The new data centre is being designed in accordance with the Tier IV reliability level.

The Yurlovsky data centre is being built using cooling technology without the use of freon systems, which minimises the impact on the environment. The data centre will be cooled with outside air (free-cooling technology), and adiabatic mats will be used as post-cooling. These and other measures will allow Selectel to save energy and take up less usable computer room space.

Yurlovsky will become the second Selectel data centre in Moscow. Another five data centres of the company are located in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.

In addition, in May 2022, it became known that the X5 Group would deploy the cloud in the Selectel data centre. To host the platform, the company provided X5 Group with dedicated servers of arbitrary (custom) configurations, dedicated network equipment, communication channels and dedicated racks, etc.

 

Situation in the data centre market

In March 2022, Russia was predicted to have a shortage of servers and hardware for them. This was reported by Forbes, citing sources in an unnamed system integrator, as well as a source close to the manufacturer of server hardware. According to their forecasts, the market will begin to feel the deficit in the next three to six months. The reason for it is the anti-Russian sanctions, as a result of which Intel and AMD, among others, stopped supplying their processors to Russia, including server ones.

In addition, data centre market participants told CNews that many foreign manufacturers of data centre engineering equipment have also stopped supplying it to Russia. We are talking about power supply, cooling and ventilation systems, as well as security systems that are used in the centres.

Despite this, Director for Development of Infrastructure Products, Selectel Konstantin Ansimov believes that not everything is as bad on the market as it is presented.

“Can Russian companies now get processors from leading international vendors? Yes, they can,” he told CNews.

In a conversation with the media, he noted that the problem with supplies is beginning to be resolved. New supply chains are being formed. There are deliveries directly from China, for example, and the so-called ‘friendly countries’. However, the lengthening and complexity of supply chains has already led to a significant increase in the cost of IT equipment: for certain items, equipment prices in dollars can increase up to 2.5 times, Konstantin Ansimov emphasised.

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