Our Nine Infrastructure

Cooling is one of the most important components of a data centre. The type of cooling system used not only has a significant impact on overall energy consumption, but on the potential energy density and therefore degree of utilisation of the data centre.

Modern data centres are designed with a cold aisle arrangement, rather than cooling the entire data centre space. At Nine, our cold aisle design ensures that energy is used efficiently, while also making an important contribution to green IT.

In cold aisle cooling, the cool air is routed over the raised floor to the front of the racks, which face one another. This aisle is sealed by doors and a roof. The server systems suction the cool air and emit it as heated air into the space outside the cold aisle. This space is known as the hot aisle. The emission of heated air causes the ambient temperature in the hot aisle to increase significantly, and particularly at the back of the racks temperatures can reach well over 30°C. However, by using rack-optimised equipment and a constant, regulated temperature in the cold aisle, the raised temperatures do not present any problems.

In the cold aisle itself, a consistently low air temperature is maintained regardless of the location of the server system within a rack. The high temperature level between the cold and hot aisle allows the air conditioning to work more efficiently, which in turn allows longer use of free cooling without cooling systems, even with relatively high outside temperatures of up to 15°C.

An important aspect of the overall cold/hot aisle concept is the use of rack-optimised equipment. The cold air must be suctioned correctly at the front. The racks must also be properly sealed with panels to ensure that no hot air can get into the cold aisle. It is therefore essential that unused rack units are completely sealed. In order to be able to ensure this, and therefore contribute effectively to green IT practices, Nine conducts weekly inspections in the data centre.

As a further contribution to green IT, Nine only uses power generated from renewable energy sources. Our travel is also completely climate-neutral thanks to our collaboration with myclimate (certificate 2021). Customers of Nine who want to run their server product in an eco-friendly way can add the CO2-neutral operation and/or eco-power options to their product simply by sending us an email.

Nine has two separate locations in Zurich. The production servers and backups are split betweentwo locations. Both data centres are connected to one another using a redundant dark fibre ring. This connection allows for the redundant exchange of data between the two data centres at a speed of 2 x 10 Gbps. In addition, the ring connection ensures the high availability: If part of the ring is disrupted, the remaining parts take over the data transfer automatically.

Cooling is one of the most important components of a data centre. The type and method of the cooling system is not only responsible for a sizeable portion of the entire power consumption – it also determines the potential power density and, thus, the utilisation of a data centre. Today's data centres are set up according to the cold aisle containment principle instead of cooling the entire area of the data centre. Nine also uses the cold aisle design for efficient energy use, thereby making an important contribution to green IT.