Larry Dignan wrote on his blog about Data Center design 101, but his knowledge about the data center essentially boils down to one word: Money. Larry attended two Gartner IT Symposium presentations to learn more about data center designs and shared his views about why companies are building new data centers and how the vendors are “killing each other to be the data center king“.
In his blog post, he shared what he had learned, which are:
- Companies are only building what they need. Weak economy and green IT initiatives are pushing them to cut footprint and maximize savings.
- Mixing of tiers within one data center facility to allow segmentation of applications based on the importance to the business.
- Everyone has a box for mid-sized and large business, including IBM, Rackable, Sun, Verari Systems, HP, et al, that can deploy in 12 to 14 weeks. (a.k.a. containerized data centers).
- POD architecture – Today, it’s all about pods. With this approach, you figure out how much space you need, then build out for five to seven years, adding pods as you grow.
- Combining pod architecture with density zones by mixing and marching densities.
(see density or money chart on the right) - Raised floor are passe.
What I would concur with Larry is on his points about not getting locked into anything proprietary. This is very true and something noteworthy to remember. Realistically, the design principles as Larry have learned are all product or technology agnostic. There are nothing specific about mixing tiers. It just means that within the same facility, we would have different levels of redundancies in different zones. What it also tells us is that nothing was specified about what products, brands, vendors to use.
So, how much more is there to efficient data center designs than these basic principles? The theory itself is fairly simple and basic. However, the details that goes into putting up a design would entail much more effort. It is in the detailed specification of the design where I would usually sit down with my client to work out exactly what cooling architecture to deploy and this decision is not based on which vendor is nicer to me. It is a decision that will be based on the client’s budget, physical constraints and limitations of the room, desire to use or not to use chilled water within the facility, requirements on maximizing usable floor space for IT equipment racks, plumbing limitations, density of the loads for each zone, and many more. It is a complex decision making process and most of the time, the important part of a consultant’s role is to make sure that we provide adequately an unbiased expert advice to our client to help them reach the appropriate decision.
A complete view of Larry’s post is available here.
Tags: Consulting, Data Center, Density, Efficiency, Emerging trends, strategy