Problem

Nautilus’ legacy SCADA system was rigid and lacked the flexibility necessary to quickly make enhancements or introduce new functionality to their dynamic environment. The previous system’s rigidly extended to interoperability as well. As with any data center, especially one that supports multiple customers, Nautilus has a wide variety of equipment that needs to communicate holistically without forcing staff to physically interact with each machine. Nautilus rebuilt the platform in Ignition to alleviate their software frustrations.

Solution

The Ignition platform now serves three roles inside Nautilus:

1. A high-level control and visibility layer for the operations team running the Stockton data center, with primary and secondary loop telemetry, mechanical and electrical system monitoring, and historical reporting that lets operators compare year-over-year water temperatures and spot anomalies.
2. A customer-facing BMS interface at every site where Nautilus’ EcoCore COOL CDU is deployed.
3. A testing platform to validate new functionality before a product goes to a customer or to their own data center.

The Ignition platform acts as a Rosetta Stone for Nautilus, pulling all of their equipment into a single operational view. Nautilus uses Ignition Edge to capture data at the unit level, the Tag Historian Module for time-series storage, the SQL Bridge Module for integration with downstream systems, and the Reporting Module for operational and historical reporting.

But Perspective is the heartbeat of the system. The HMI presents the full cooling stack on a single pane of glass: primary and secondary loop conditions, CDU performance, mechanical and electrical systems, chilled water, and alarm state. Operators see the relationships across loops rather than chasing individual point readings.

Nautilus’ first production EcoCore COOL deployment, complete with Ignition interface, is at Start Campus’ SINES Data Campus in Portugal. The SINES Data Campus is a 1.2GW data center that utilizes 100% renewable energy and targets an industry-leading PUE of 1.1 and a WUE of 0 by harnessing the cooling power of the ocean. However, the Ignition implementation was not originally part of the solution.

Nautilus developed the Ignition application solely as an internal commissioning tool. When Start Campus’ operations team faced challenges with their own BMS installation, they asked Nautilus if they could use the Ignition interface. Over a year later, Start Campus still operates the CDUs through the Nautilus-built Ignition application. Now, Start Campus’ operations team “live and breathe” this application.

Result

For Nautilus, Ignition removed the bottleneck between running a data center and maintaining its SCADA system. Functionality that used to require months of professional services now takes days, built and deployed by Nautilus’ in-house team.

For Start Campus, the platform has become the daily operating environment for the cooling system at a campus that is now fully leased, including the European Union's first deployment of NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra in support of Microsoft, with rack densities surpassing 130 kW. The Nautilus controls platform is the operational layer that holds those targets at AI-class density.

Most data center controls projects start with the building. This one started with more than half a million hours of operating data and worked backward into the architecture. Nautilus is the rare company that built the operations practice first and then turned it into a product. Every UDT, alarm threshold, and screen in Perspective was shaped by operators who had run the actual system through real thermal events.

For the wider industry, the project is a working example of what becomes possible when a data center is treated as an industrial plant and managed accordingly.

Project Scope

• Start Date: 7/2024

• Deploy Date: 9/2024

• Tags: 3,950

• Screens: 15 with 7 pop-ups

• Clients: 12 in use on average, plus an additional 2 on handheld devices at Start Campus.

• Alarms: ~2,400

• Devices: 610

• Architecture: Hub & Spoke

• Database: 1 MariaDB

• Historical data logged: ~450 tags

• Number of people on team: 2

• Ignition Ecosystem: Opto 22