The Principal Financial Group is a leading global financial institution offering businesses, individuals and institutional clients a wide range of financial products and services. Headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, they serve more than 13 million customers worldwide.
KJWW was commissioned as the systems concept engineer for a remote disaster recovery-computing center. Half of the facility remains empty, for the purpose of relocating computer equipment from another data center in the event of a disaster.
Packaged chilled water-cooled computer room air conditioners condition the data center with N+1 redundancy. Each computer room unit sits within a large drip pan under the raised floor and has leak detection. Three 250-ton air-cooled chillers provide cooling with N+1 redundancy. Three air-cooled dry coolers with N+1 redundancy produce chilled water in the wintertime as a waterside economizer. The UPS, computer room unit, and chiller equipment controls are fully integrated with the building automation system. The building is protected by a double-interlocked pre-action system throughout the facility with a FM200 clean agent fire suppression system below the raised floor.
The power distribution system is configured in a 2N fashion. The center has two-megawatt generators to provide complete redundancy for the entire facility. The generators can parallel with the utility grid and have utility grade protective relay schemes. Two UPS systems with wet cell batteries are located in an adjacent room. The system is set up for two separate utility feeds from the local utility company. The power system uses programmable logic controllers to automatically control circuit breakers and switch power flow as needed to maintain power at all times.
The computing center is a highly secured area with palm readers, card readers, cameras, and door monitor switches.