FedEx Announces Opening of Green Data Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado

The International logistics giant FedEx recently announced the opening of a corporate data center in the Northgate business park in the Colorado Springs area. In a press release, FedEx said that the data center, which is the outcome of seven long years of planning and construction will eventually replace a nearly 30-year-old similar facility near its corporate headquarters in Memphis, Tenn.

“This facility in the long term will replace our corporate technology center in Memphis,” CIO of FedEx, Rob Carter confirmed in a statement.

However, the company's Enterprise Data Center-West won't be in full operation until late 2013 as equipment is installed, tested and put into operation and both software applications and data are moved onto thousands of servers the center will house, said Kevin Humphries, senior vice president of information technology for FedEx Services.

Located southwest of Voyager Parkway and North Gate Boulevard, the new data center is going to become the primary data center for FEDEX representing 40 percent of the company’s computing capacity. “We have made a significant investment this facility. It will be one of our largest data centers for years to come,” Carter noted.

According to FedEx, the 140,000-square-foot facility has been designed to be among the most energy-efficient data centers. The facility, the company says, will use about one-third less power than the average data center. At capacity, the data center will use about 8 megawatts of power, or less than 1 percent of the overall capacity of Colorado Springs Utilities and less than one-fifth of the projected power consumption of Hewlett-Packard's (News - Alert) larger data center on Rockrimmon Boulevard.

The facility will have plenty of room for expansion when it begins operation, leaving an entire floor available with a capacity to house about 3,000 servers at full capacity that operate the company's package-tracking, billing, aviation planning and other systems.

FedEx has applied for LEED certification for this new data center.The building is designed to use outside air to cool the data center more than 200 days a year and includes an elaborate system to move the heat generated by its servers through an extensive ventilation system into the atmosphere.

Last month, FedEx SupplyChain, a subsidiary of FedEx Corp. announced significant enhancements to its Critical Inventory Logistics service, which will allow its Critical Inventory Logistics customers worldwide to track the status of orders, shipments and inventory levels by simply logging into a web application on fedex.com. For added flexibility, order placement and status messaging are also available through electronic data interchange (EDI) and delivered in a common global message format.