Archive for the ‘Data Center Facility’ Category
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
Most people uses the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) as a metric to measure how efficient is their data center. However, increasingly, the DCiE (Datacenter Efficiency) metric is becoming more and more accepted as the metric of measurement.
Both metrics were proposed by the Green Grid in 2007, as a means to estimate the energy efficiency of their datacenters and to compare the results against other datacenters as well as to determine if any energy efficiency improvements need to be made. (more…)
Tags: Consolidation, Data Center, DCiE, Density, Efficiency, PUE, Virtualization
Posted in Consolidation & Virtualization, Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Sunday, January 24th, 2010
One of the key contributing factor towards efficiency and energy savings in data centers is preventing the mixing of hot and cold air, i.e. better air management and distribution. This can be accomplished through a containment strategy. Some vendors have products which allows containment of a single individual rack, while others offers containment of a group of racks. Whenever a discussion about containment of a group of racks, often we would hear about debates on the merits and virtues of cold-aisle versus hot-aisle containment and vice-versa.
Most of the time, many fail to realise that it is necessary to take into consideration the cooling architecture whenever we speak about containment. Both are closely related.
I’ve written a short paper providing a comparison of the two containment strategies across the 3 cooling architectures (room-oriented, row-oriented and rack-oriented). You can read the paper here: Comparison of CAC vs HAC.
Tags: airflow, Cold-aisle, Containment, Data Center, Density, Hot-aisle, PUE
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Jeff Rothschild, VP for Technology at Facebook, shared some detailed insights into Facebook architecture. Over the past few years, Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today serving over 200 billion pages per month and with more than 300 million users. The nature of social data makes engineering a site for this level of scale a particularly challenging proposition. In this presentation, Jeff discussed the aspects of social data that present challenges for scalability and the core architectural components and design principles that Facebook has used to address these challenges. He also discussed emerging technologies that offer new opportunities for building cost-effective high performance web architectures.
Here’s the link to the webcast of his presentation. (more…)
Tags: Architecture, Data Center, Opensource, Technology
Posted in Business, Data Center Facility, Emerging trends, Enterprise Architecture | Comments Off
Monday, December 7th, 2009
The latest news on the wire is that IBM has taken Syracuse University’s (SU) data centre off the electric grid. SU’s data center will be supported by tri-generation, which burns gas to provide heating, cooling and electricity in one. This is being touted as one of the world’s greenest with the on-site power generation system, liquid cooling and DC power.
In a statement released this week, IBM and Syracuse said that the $12.4 million (£7.5m) , 12,000-square-foot facility is set to become fully operational in January and will use around 50 percent less energy than an equivalent sized facility according to IBM. The computer giant, which is backing the data centre to the tune of $5 million, is also planning to build a Green Data Centre Analysis and Design Centre in 2010 to help other organisations who want to create similar facilities.
(more…)
Tags: Data Center, Efficiency, power, PUE
Posted in Data Center Facility, Going Green | Comments Off
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Verizon Business will launch an Asia-Pacific data centre for its computing as a service (CaaS) customers in the region and to address issues of latency, security and compliance.
Ray McQuillan, principal consultant at Verizon Business Global Services, could not name the location for the data centre, but said that it would launch in Q1 of the next calendar year.
“We know that the global coverage – and moving nodes over into the Asia-Pacific – is something on the calendar currently for 2010,” he said. “Right now the CaaS offer is available across the globe, but in terms of having a local presence in Asia-Pacific we have one Europe, one in the US, and another in APAC. That is something the market has been asking for and we have it on our roadmap.”
(more…)
Tags: APAC, Business, Cloud Computing, Data Center, strategy
Posted in Cloud Computing, Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
A recent Quocirca Insight report which was derived from 301 interviews with senior IT influencers and decision makers shows what we have already experiencing in most data centres: Crisis point as data centres runs into space and power constraints through years of uncontrolled growth, expansion and contraction.
Some salient points from the report:
- While the server sprawl continues, as much as 87% of IT budgets aren’t growing in real terms to alleviate the pressure.
- 28% of respondents does not know the exact number of servers they have, 22% said it could take up to a day to find a server that had gone down, another 20% will take longer than a day, and 11% of data centres will run out of space within a year, while 14% have already hit a power supply limit.
- Lack of communications and human factors contribute to the crisis, e.g. IT and facility managers aren’t talking enough.
- Power-saving approaches such as virtualization and automation, exists in abundance but they require up-front investment before the savings can be realised. Justification is challenging where data centres aren’t charging for their costs.
- Good asset planning tools can help data centre managers to manage the complex environments in their facility, but not all have access to such tools.
(more…)
Tags: Consolidation, Cost, Data Center, Operation, OPEX, Service Management, Virtualization
Posted in Consolidation & Virtualization, Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
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: (more…)
Tags: Consulting, Data Center, Density, Efficiency, Emerging trends, strategy
Posted in Data Center Facility, Going Green | Comments Off
Friday, October 16th, 2009
It has been almost four days since I last blogged. Have been busy with a client in Tokyo.
This photo is a view from my hotel room at Shibuya. On the top left, you can see Tokyo tower at a distant away.
Look carefully at the picture and you’ll see that in general, there are buildings which are 10 stories high, in the middle of smaller buildings and there are occasionally a few which are 20 or more stories high. And here I am, looking out of my hotel room window, on the 29th storey. This is exactly the same state that we most likely will observe in a typical data center floor. There will be racks with highly densed equipment, consuming upwards of 15kW or more power, and right next to it, might be a patch panel rack with a few layer 2 switches, which is lower density. Each row of equipment racks and each individual rack will have varying composition of density.
(more…)
Tags: Architecture, Data Center, Density, Efficiency, PUE
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Every data center project begins with the business plan and business requirements in mind. This is fundamentally the starting point and the first building blocks of a data center project. An enterprise with intention to build a data center facility for their own internal use may have an easier time to establish and understand this starting point. But for a Data Center service provider offering co-location and hosting services, then it gets a little bit complicated.
In reality, regardless of how closely the initial design matches with the business requirements, in the long run, data center facilities rarely achieve the efficiency, capacity and operational targets defined in their initial designs. This is because a data center environment is never static and like a living organism, it is always evolving. In the day to day operations, there will be people / human traffic, periodic changes, expansions, upgrades, introduction of new equipment, de-commissioning of aged equipment, and other external influences. As time goes by, newer technologies, with possibly higher density equipment, requiring substantial incremental power and cooling capacity, will replace aged equipment. Pressures to maximize utilization and reduce costs, will lead towards consolidation of data centers into few locations, adoption of virtualization technologies, causing changes in operational procedures, etc. All these are part and parcel of the evolution of a data center environment, and no matter how you strive to achieve an equilibrium, as soon as you think you have reached an equilibrium, the operating conditions will likely change again.
For Data Center service providers, who are like hotels, they will rarely know when their next customers will be coming through their doors, or what kind of equipment these customers will be hosting at their facility. How do you plan the design of a facility for such requirement when these requirements are not known at present day?
(more…)
Tags: Business, Cost, Data Center, Density, Design, Plan, PUE
Posted in Business, Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Since I’m on the subject of facility, I might as well cover a few more points on data center facility, measurement and sensors. When I think about sensors, it reminded me of my first job. I used to be with a Systems Integrator, working on Plant Information Management Systems (PIMS) for refineries, gas plants, utilities, etc. I remember once, I was 120km west of Doha, Qatar, and was commissioning the PIMS system together with my customer and main contractor. It was August, in the mid-90’s. We were going through the screens and data points / tags with values collected from field instruments in the plant via their Distributed Control System (DCS).
As we review the data points, we came across a few thermocouples out in the plant indicating measurements of 54′C to 60′C. Although it was a hot summer day, a reasonable reading for those tags should be in the range of 45′C to 50′C. It was an interesting anomaly…
For a gas plant, it is very critical that the plant data collected are accurate as the data are used for planning purposes, production controls, yield accounting, and many other forms of analysis.
For a data center, data accuracy is also equally important.
(more…)
Tags: Data Center, Efficiency, electrical, Metric, Operation, Operations, RH, Temperature
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
I spent some time over the weekend reviewing ASHRAE’s latest document on Real-time Energy Consumption Measurements in Data Centers. It is quite a comprehensive book in explaining and providing guidelines on energy, power systems, air and hydronic measurements.
One of the interesting topic explained in this ASHRAE book was related to how accuracy of sensors may influence the efficiency of chillers.
(more…)
Tags: Chiller, Data Center, Efficiency, PUE, Temperature
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Between June and September of 2009, SearchDataCenter.com conducted the Data Center Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey. Subscribers were contacted by email and invited to participate. For this 2009 survey, they had a total of 920 respondents, identifying themselves as IT managers, IT administrators, data center facility managers and IT executives. Respondents were primarily U.S.-based (43%), but the survey also included participants from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. More than half of respondents’ organizations employ more than 1,000 workers, and more than 25% of the companies have more than 10,000 employees.
Compared with last summer, data center budget growth screeched to a halt this year. In 2008, 30% of IT shops said they were increasing budget 5% to 10%, and 26% said they planned to increase budget more than 10%. Less than 15% of respondents were decreasing budget at all.
(more…)
Tags: Consolidation, Data Center, Density, Emerging trends, ITIL, Service Management, services, Virtualization
Posted in Business, Consolidation & Virtualization, Data Center Facility, Service Management | Comments Off
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Marine mammals like dolphins breathe just like us. But while humans can breathe even when our conscious mind is asleep, dolphins are equipped with a voluntary respiratory system and therefore must keep part of their brain alert to trigger each breath. To avoid drowning, it is crucial that marine mammals retain control of their blowhole, which is a flap of skin that opens and closes under the dolphin’s voluntary control. Although still a matter of discussion, most researchers feel that in order to breathe, a dolphin must be conscious and alert to recognize that its blowhole is at the surface. So, how does a dolphin sleep?
The bottlenose dolphin sleeps by shutting down only half of its brain, along with the opposite eye. The other half of the brain stays awake at a low level of alertness. This attentive side is used to watch for predators, obstacles and other animals. It also signals when to rise to the surface for a fresh breath of air. After approximately two hours, the animal will reverse this process, resting the active side of the brain and awaking the rested half. This pattern is often called cat-napping.
So, applying the same concept on data center facilities, how do we maintain and service the critical infrastructure components in our data centers without reducing the number of capacity units required to support the data center?
(more…)
Tags: Data Center, Operations, protection, PUE, strategy
Posted in Data Center Facility, Service Management | Comments Off
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
In our daily life, we deal with recurring capacity problems day in and day out. Planning for capacity allocation, whether in our personal lives or at work, is a mix of science, art, guess works and perhaps some level of luck too. This is the same whether it is for sizing up physical compute and data arrays for a virtualized environment and likewise, for data center facilities.
Michael Manos wrote an interesting piece around data center capacity planning (entitled “Chiller-side Chats: The Capacity Problem“) and provided a very impartial explanation to bridge the understanding between IT, data center manager and the business around this complex subject. In Manos’ blog, he elaborated using an example of planning the power allocation and distribution in a data center. (more…)
Tags: Data Center, Density, Efficiency, electrical
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
We all know that in the world we live in, water exists in 3 forms – liquid, gas and solid. Water vapor refers to the gas form of water and it is produced from evaporation or boiling of liquid water. Liquid water starts to boil when its vapor pressure reaches its surrounding pressure. 
Below is a graph plotting the relationship of water vapor pressure versus temperature. Note that at the normal boiling point of 100°C, the vapor pressure equals the standard atmospheric pressure of 760 Torr or 101.325 kPa (approximately 7.5 Torr per kPa), and that is where evaporative cooling takes place (water turning into gas form takes a part of the heat with it). Anyway, enough of boring details…
So, what is the significance of water vapor in the context of data centers? Well, we first need to understand two terms – relative humidity and dew point.
(more…)
Tags: Air Management, Data Center, humidity, protection, RH, strategy, Temperature
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Monday, September 21st, 2009
Found this interesting article (entitled Minimizing UPS and Gen-Set Incompatibility) explaining about compatibility issues with UPS and gensets, primarily due to:
- Failure of the UPS to acquire and accept power from the gen-set,
- Instability of the gen-set frequency or voltage when powering the UPS,
- Inability of the UPS to synchronize its output to the gen-set,
- Inability to enable the operation of the maintenance bypass circuit,
- Excessive output voltage distortion, and
- Power transfer issues.
(more…)
Tags: Data Center, electrical, generator, UPS
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Sunday, September 20th, 2009
Selecting the site for a new data center facility is both a business and technology decision. The selection process is a very important step as the outcome, once decided and finalized, is seldom reversible once the design and construction begins.
So, what are the factors to consider in selecting a site? It depends on many factors and the following are 10 of the factors to consider: (more…)
Tags: Data Center, strategy
Posted in Data Center Facility | Comments Off
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
When we think about designing and building a new data center in today’s terms, it is not a simple task anymore. Data center facilities are large, capital-intensive fixed assets and requires enormous amount of thought process in it as designing such facility is fraught with risks and cost. Just like building a home, once you get the architecture and foundation completed, whatever shape and form of the house, you will have to live with it for the next 10 to 20 years; For a data center, once you get the architecture right, you create an asset that will facilitate the rapid launch of your new technologies which will give your business that competitive edge.
One of the reasons why it is so difficult to design a data center is the mismatch of the planning horizons. Data center architects are pushed to design and plan for a data center that will last for at least 20 years. However, IT and technology innovation cycle moves at a much faster pace. So, the mismatch here is that we need to design a facility to support future technologies for 20 years, but our insight into the direction of technology is probably only on the horizon of next two or three years. (more…)
Tags: Data Center, Network
Posted in Data Center Facility, Emerging trends, Networking | Comments Off
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
I chanced upon this scene (below) on the way out for lunch over the weekend. While the bank branch was under renovation, they placed a few containers outside and created a make-shift containerized temporary banking center outside. Innovative use of containers.
Actually, there are many many ways to make use of containers. Currently, approximately 90% of all non-bulk cargo worldwide are moved by containers stacked on transport ships. Although ISO standardized containers into five common standard lengths, 20-ft (6.1 m), 40-ft (12.2 m), 45-ft (13.7 m), 48-ft (14.6 m), and 53-ft (16.2 m), we usually hear of just the 20-ft and 40-ft versions.
One of the many creative way of using a 20-ft standard sized container is to turn it into a compact data center facility. (more…)
Tags: Container, Data Center, Efficiency, Emerging trends
Posted in Data Center Facility, Emerging trends | Comments Off
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
Data Center facilities, unlike our homes and office buildings, requires a different treatment in terms of protection against fire.
But before we touch on that topic, lets first understand the nature of fire. To do so, lets learn about the fire triangle or combustion triangle. This is the basic foundation for understanding the ingredients necessary for most fires. It has largely been replaced in the industry by the fire tetrahedron, which add further aspects.
The triangle illustrates the rule that in order to ignite and burn, a fire requires three elements: heat, fuel, and an oxidizing agent (usually oxygen) and the fire can be suppressed or extinguished by removing any one of them. Only in the right mixture or combination, will a fire occur.
(more…)
Tags: Data Center, fire, protection
Posted in Data Center Facility, Security | Comments Off
