A subsidiary of British engine specialist Rolls-Royce has delivered ten generators to a newly built data center in Beijing, China, owned and operated by local cloud provider Sinnet.

The system consists of 20V diesel-fired series 4000 MTU engines, each with an electrical output of 2,000 kW.

“Rolls-Royce Power Systems is one of the few suppliers worldwide, whose expertise and product quality in emergency diesel engines has made it one of the preferred partners for operators of large and system critical data centers,” said Andreas Görtz, head of Power Generation Business at Rolls-Royce Power Systems.

Engines of progress

Gensets on a roof
Gensets on the roof of the data center – Rolls-Royce

Sinnet operates eight data centers across China, totaling 11,000 square meters of space and 1,220 racks.

Earlier this month, cloud giant AWS announced that Sinnet would be buying its assets in China for 2 billion yuan ($301.2m). The transaction was arranged in order for AWS to comply with national security laws that prevent non-Chinese companies from owning certain critical infrastructure assets – enabling it to continue providing cloud services in the country.

Sinnet’s latest data center in eastern Beijing is expected to open before the end of the year. The gensets for the facility were delivered in August and commissioned in October. They were installed on the roof by power integration company Tianjin Pauway Power Equipment Co. and supplied with diesel stored in eight underground tanks.

“For us, the high availability and reliability are the most decisive factors for choosing MTU engines, said Hao Liu, president at Pauway.

“Our customers depend on us ensuring that the data flow is maintained at all times – even a power outage must not lead to any disruption or impairment of our service whatsoever.”