Since I started on the topic of consolidation and virtualization, here’s my take on server virtualization and the 8 things you should be aware of: (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Density’
8 things you should know about Server Virtualization
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010Measuring Datacenter Transformations
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010Most 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…)
Comparing Cold-Aisle vs. Hot-Aisle Containment
Sunday, January 24th, 2010One 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.
What else can we talk about Data Center designs?
Sunday, November 8th, 2009Larry 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…)
Cityscape and Data Center floor
Friday, October 16th, 2009It 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.
Planning for a new Data Center?
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?
The 2009 Data Center Purchasing Survey Report
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.
Capacity Planning: Big Rocks, Little Rocks story
Saturday, September 26th, 2009In 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…)
CFM and Density in Data Centers
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009I recently received a query regarding the relationship between CFM (cubic feet per minute) and density of heat load that can be supported in a data center using a room-oriented cooling architecture.
CFM is a non-SI unit of measurement of the flow of a gas or liquid that indicates how much volume in cubic feet pass by a stationary point in one minute. rate of air-flow. In a typical data center facility that has conditioned air being delivered through a subfloor and via perforated tiles to cool down IT equipment in racks, it sure helps to understand the relationship between CFM (air-flow), temperature rise, heat dissipation and the amount of cooling capacity required. The diagram below charts the relationship between the required cooling capacity (in kW) per tile versus the required air-flow (in CFM), assuming a delta temperature of 20′F. (more…)
