The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP), a nonprofit that works to bring hyperscale innovations to all, announced that Aligned Data Centers as the first data center provider to earn OCP Ready for Hyperscale certification. This recognition marks a milestone for the tech infrastructure company, its ORD-02 facility in Chicagoland becomes the first certified under this program.
Aligned Data Centers is an OCP Community member known for its innovation, efficiency, scalability and commitment to sustainability. ORD-02 earned near-optimal results across its OCP Ready site assessment, exceeding standards across key areas such as site access and logistics, structural, cooling, connectivity, service, efficiency and certifications. The data center also recently received Green Globes for New Construction certification from the Green Building Initiative (GBI), earning three Green Globes for its design and construction, demonstrating outstanding success in resource efficiency, environmental impact reduction and occupant well-being. Aligned’s standardized, award-winning methodologies are utilized across its data center portfolio.
The new certification coincides with the launch of the new OCP Ready for Hyperscale program from the OCP.
Certification was co-led by OCP Project leads Mark Dansie and Scott Sharp, working within the Data Center Facilities Project at the OCP, and was created to focus on hyperscale requirements related to logistics, site access and base building infrastructure.
By adhering to a community-led checklist and completing the approval process, data center operators who achieve OCP Ready for Hyperscale designations demonstrate their readiness to accommodate hyperscale wholesale deployments across a range of criteria.
The program’s primary goal is to help hyperscalers identify data center locations where they can reserve space, power and cooling earlier in the cycle. For data center operators, this certification not only proves hyperscale capabilities, but avoids unusable critical infrastructure due to basic building constraints and reduces redundancies in the requirements gathering phase of customer engagements.
“Aligned is proud to receive the first-ever OCP Ready for Hyperscale Certification for our ORD-02 data center, validating our longstanding capabilities in hyperscale deployments. The program streamlines the data center selection process for hyperscale companies, reducing potential risk and time-to-market,” says Andrew Schaap, the CEO of Aligned Data Centers. “Aligned’s data centers prioritize scalability and flexibility to meet our customers’ specific IT infrastructure requirements. From our flexible, sustainable designs to our industry-leading, high-density cooling technologies – including air, liquid, and hybrid configurations – we unlock seamless scaling for hyperscale businesses, maximizing efficiency and effectiveness.”
“The New OCP Ready for Hyperscale certification aims to standardize facility criteria that are compatible with all hyperscalers,” said OCP Ready Facilities program co-lead, Scott Sharp. “Establishing a standard for base-building infrastructure reduces the time required to select a suitable data center for deployments. The data center industry is growing rapidly and ensuring new facilities are compatible with the customer requirements is extremely important.”
“Aligned Data Centers’ Chicago OCP Ready for Hyperscale certification marks a new era for identifying colocation data centers optimized for hyperscale wholesale deployments. This collaborative effort among hyperscalers within the OCP Community not only validates Aligned’s readiness to accommodate hyperscale needs but also underscores the impact that the OCP is having on the colocation industry to drive efficiency and innovation in the data center sector,” says Mark Dansie, OCP Ready Facilities program lead.
Aligned Data Center’s ORD-02 data center is now listed on the OCP Marketplace, here. For more information about the OCP Ready for Hyperscale Data Center program, contact Mark Dansie.
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