21Feb 08
Forget the raised floor, where are the generators?
Posted by Angus Kidman @ 8:30 2 comments
The components that make up a modern datacentre often look disturbingly like commodity items: a server here, a rack there, spaghetti tangles of cable everywhere.
But there's one item that is still something of a rarity -- and no, I'm not talking about the expertise needed to run it.
I was reminded of this recently while touring through Sun Microsystems' main datacentre in Santa Clara. Having consolidated 32 of its centres into one, saving 120,000 odd square feet of floor space and a whole bunch of electricity, Sun is understandably keen to show it off.
One of the relatively unusual features is a lack of raised flooring, often the most predictable element of datacentre decor. Most of the centre uses slab floors and closely-coupled cooling (though there's a small raised section for performance testing, reflecting the reality that most existing datacentres are built that way).
When centre manager Dean Nelson pointed out the gigantic 1000-ton chiller unit outside which helped make the low-floor approach possible, I remarked that presumably those were relatively uncommon items. "Oh, chillers are no problem," Nelson replied. "The challenge is getting the generators. There's a two-year lead time." Who knew? Here we are in a 24/7 on-demand society, but one of the oldest components is still one of the slowest to get delivered.
On reflection, that seems both a good and bad thing. Not being able to order generators on tap means power-hungry datacentres can't be rolled out like cane toads across the landscape. Conversely, not being able to consolidate makes it harder to reduce requirements in existing centres.
Not that we should kid ourselves that people do these things to be nice to the planet. As Nelson noted, repeating an oft-heard Sun mantra: "You're going to make economic decisions and the result will be ecology."
But you'd better place those power equipment orders fast.
Disclosure: Angus Kidman travelled to Santa Clara as a guest of Sun.
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The days of raised floors should have long passed - but old school technical managers can't see past the end of the shoes.
Raised floor adds NOTHING to cooling efficiency.
It creates a nice place wehere you can hide all your cabling fiasco's but thats about it.
I toured data centres in europe, asia and usa in the mid 90's and most of them did not have raised floors. It allowed them the luxury of having a system of any weight on the floor - as long as the concrete could support it.
No issues with zinc filings, floor static etc etc etc. And cleaning was just so easy. Seal the concrete with anti-static paint - mop once a week - voila - no dust issues causing power supply failures.
All services fed from the roof - power - data and yes - some chilled water for some of the larger systems.
There is very little equipment these days that actually needs air fed from the bottom.
An the practice of building a room for the "operators" inside or immediately adjacent to the data hall. Forget it. Everything is remote console. Tape changes don't need somebody right on top of the library. Integrate the operators back into the greater support team.
And yes - I had to wait for 18 months for a generator to ship from UK. Normal stuff for anyone who has any experience in building data centres.
What I see here is a whole pile of organisations decing they need a data centre - and then not engaging specialist teams to advise, design, manage and deliver a functional data centre.
Don't be suprised when it is handed over that you can not wheel a rack in on a trolley becuse the doors are too low - do not be suprised that you can't negotiate that bend in the loading bay with your pallet of disk drives for your storage array because you made the corridors too narrow.