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Generator Delays May Slow Data Center Projects
miller60 writes "The data center building boom is causing backlogs for new generator orders, with some companies reporting delivery delays of up to a year for new 2,000kw units, which are the current standard for mission-critical facilities. Generator availability is 'the No. 1 thing that will drive your construction schedules,' according to Equinix, which is building centers in three major markets. 'This will be a big issue for the next wave of data center builds,' says another industry executive. Used generators and smaller units tend to be more available than the 2 megawatt units, but companies targeting the enterprise sector may be wary of relaying on used units or smaller generators than those powering competing facilities."
HOLY MOLY, that's a lot of power! If you had 250 watt power supplies, all running at maximum, you'd be able to power 8,000 power supplies simultaneously! You could run a small town on a generator that large! Or to put it another way, you could use it to power a Diesel Locomotive capable of pulling dozens of fully loaded cars.
Wow, just wow. That's just an incredible amount of power to be putting in a datacenter. Is it even possible for these centers to run off the grid?
The part that I don't undestand is this: Why do they need just one generator? If you're having difficulties obtaining a 2Mw unit, wouldn't it make sense to get two smaller units? You'd waste a bit of extra space, but you'd have redundancy that a single genearator couldn't offer.
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Without a generator, the project stops.
Easy, just buy 400 5kw generators instead of 1 2000kw generator.
You may have to hire more people to start them, though. And change the oil.
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This would introduce partial redundancy into the system. However, synchronizing with 50/60 hz between gensets might pose an issue.
If you've built out your data center but the generators have not yet arrived, a quick and inexpensive solution is to buy several thousand hamsters and hamster wheels. These will keep your data center humming along in the event of an outage. If PETA starts protesting, sysadmins with larger wheels can be substituted. Most of them will find this activity a welcome break from the inane busywork in their everday lives.
...reliable than a single large unit, no matter how new.
... welcome to this night's episode of "SI Abuse"! Tonight, we will wildly mix prefixes, spaces, significant digits and, to top it all off, we will secretly replace a capital with a miniscule letter. The first team to find the misspelled unit gets 10 points!
You need to remember, its not just the computers & servers. Its the lights, the heating/AC, all other power needs. We have a generator at my work and it has to power EVERYTHING. 100 desktops 34 thin clients, 19 laptops, 34 servers, the A/C for the data center, the elevator, the emergency lighting, fire detection system, phones... you get the idea. We have a 30 KVA battery backup for the data center in case the generator doesn't kick on the right way.
Wouldn't having datacenters switch over to DC power and then just using a massive battery backup system help with this? Or batteries more exspensive than having generators.
I'd still keep a few generators in backup, but woulnd't you need less of them with DC?
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Take out a $10,000 simolian loan and place a natural gas power plant in a corner. It costs $9,000 simolians and produces "moderate pollution", so residential and commercial zones won't develop well nearby. But your city won't grow quickly without a lot of power.
Developers: We can use your help.
I didn't see any delays on a project I am working on. We have 4 Gens in the 2MW range plus 3 gas/diesel gens in the 30MW range. Of course, this isn't for a datacenter, but I wonder if the generators would be the same.
Approximately how much is 2MW per hour for energy cost? Is it around 110.00 Per hour? Or 10 times as much?... I wonder if the data center will actually be worth the cost overall...
You would think that companies that make larger generators (I'm talking > 100kW) would understand that demand goes up during hurricane season, and things of that nature.
We only encountered a one month delay on delivery of our 125kW natural gas fired generator. Our delay was mostly because of hurricane Katrina having struck the gulf coast. We had to pull some serious string but since we wouldn't be moving in until November of 2005, it didn't really impact us.
Fuel Cell
I believe they can produce Natural Gas fuel cells that can produce this kind of output. I think I heard that most of Times Square runs off of two units that reside on the mid floors of a nearby building. Its a great idea becuase usually something incredibly catastrophic has to happen before the natural gas supply is cut. If that happens you probably have bigger problems than your data center going down.
Why is 2,000 kW the magic number? I've worked on several Data Centers, and used anything from a single 150 kW to a few 1,700 kWers. What about 1,000 kW or 3,000 kW? What about gas vs diesel?
I would hope that these are cogeneration type plants. There is no sense not using all that waste heat. Besides, most of those data centres need cooling, so you easily have another thermal load you could feed off the cogen plant. The decision as to Otto (spark ignition), Diesel, Rankine (gas turbine), Stirling or other prime mover depends on the mix of heat to electricity needed, but I wouldn't be surprised if nobody thought about cogeneration and just assumed otto/diesel generator sets.
Wrap the entire building in foil. Add a layer of thin dielectric, then another layer of foil.
Must remember to put rubber mats in all the entryways, of course.
Bonus benefit: no need for a security system. Just give the phone number of the county coroner to the janitor, so that if someone tries to break in overnight, the bodies will be cleaned up before anyone arrives for work in the morning.
need 20 or 30 2MW generators! [...]I know there are several 60-75MW units under construction in the US now
Comming soon on eBay : 100MW generators
starting bid : 10$
condition : mint
reason : our startup went belly up.
When the next speculation bubble burst, there're sure going to be a lot of diesel mastodonts left every were...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I was having dinner with an IT guy from Skywest Airlines the other night and he told me in the last big power outage in St. George, Utah where they're based (and I live) their battery backups ran out quickly and there was a hardware problem between their generators and their IT department.
The end result is that all of their servers and network equipment went out for hours, and they had to cancel a whole lot of flights costing the company well over $1,000,000.
You can buy a lot of crappy gas generators at the Lowes across the street for $1M. I think I would have sent two guys there and two guys to the gas station to keep the essentials online.
There is a lot to be said for redundancy. Redundancy is very important. You can't talk about redundancy enough. Seriously, it's better to be twice as redundant than only half as redundant. And three times as redundant is even better than twice!
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One of the biggest delays we had building a new data center was in acquiring the transfer switches .... even once the generators and UPS systems were installed, they're useless without the transfer switches. There was about an 8-month lead time on those, and heaven help you if one of them arrives DOA. :)
Is it just me or did anyone else read that as so-that's-why-moms-can't-expand-to-meet-needs dept.
:)
I was confused, because I know that Anonymous Coward's mom expands to meet my needs
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Seems like the general environmental trend is to tear down the dams built in the 1930's (at least in California). Some of these dams also provide hydro-electric power. While most data centers are looking for on site power, you have to wonder if we're shooting ourselves in the foot by reducing the amount of power being generated from the dams to the grid. New natural gas and nuclear power plants are great if they get built but usually the NIMBY's will come out in force against a new plant.
"'This will be a big issue for the next wave of data center builds'"
/. spoke about how the Datacenter was doomed
Interesting.. considering not too long ago an article in
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Think that this could have anything to do with the storm here in buffalo? People here are in a mad dash do get there homes and businesses on backup power ASAP.
http://www.DaveNet.biz/
Typical US centered article on /. ignoring the European vendors that can send you such 2MW generators in couple weeks of a notice. Stop buying only from the 2nd best, people..
I agree with the article. I certainly wouldn't want to relay on small generators. I might rely on them, but I certain'y wouldn't relay on them.
Slashdot editors: What do they do? Do they really exist? Do people actually get paid for those jobs?
This problem is easy to fix, just switch to hamster powered generators.
Sun
Why not think about the problem from a higher level? The reason you need backup is because the grid isn't completely reliable. Why not remove your dependence on the grid instead of trying to paper over it's failures?
Install a gigantic solar system / battery storage. Or, a natural gas power plant under your control. Or even wind power. Here in California I bet you could even save money in the long run... Eric
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I swapped out all the incandescent bulbs in my new (to me) house with fluorescents and am installing more insulation in the attic; My parents just bought a new duplex unit that has an insane R value rating to meet code.
I'd have thought new technology would mean these centers would be using at most the same amount of electricity as before.
Do you know what the actual output of the generators used in modern diesel-electric locomotives is?
r k
:)
I wonder what the voltage/frequency is. I assume that the motors are all AC, but if the generators are designed to produce low-frequency AC, then you're going to have issues using that in a standard datacenter, unless you are one of those rare places that does DC distribution (where you'd just run it thought a rectifier and the incoming frequency would be irrelevant, provided your rectifier could cope). The cost of a rotary converter to go from whatever the loco produces up or down to 60Hz could be just as much as the generator itself. (And rotary converters are, at least as I understand them, nothing but motors permanently coupled to generators, with some feedback circuits to keep the output in phase.)
I've heard that many traction power systems for conventional (non-diesel) electric railways use low-frequency AC, at around 25Hz, because this has advantages in terms of the motor designs. If this is such a great advantage that people are willing to create entirely parallel power systems for electric trains in order to use it, I can't imagine that if you were designing a diesel-electric loco, where the power was only going a few feet, that you wouldn't take advantage of it.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_power_netwo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency
But you're right, if you could park an old diesel loco outside your datacenter, that would be infinite nerd points.
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So you could use say 5 500kW generators and as long as only one of them failed you would be fine. I bet you could get 5 or 6 500kW generators much cheaper (faster) than one of these high capacity ones on short supply. You could even use cheaper components with a shorter MTBF since the redundancy of the system can mask failures. I bet you could even reconfigure a data center for higher capacity simply by adding more of these inexpensive generators...
Of course the real money is in RAIG controller units and hot swapable bays...
The company I work for has a data center for our hosting business. The generator used to provide backup power is actually owned by the power company. We have first rights to use the power, but occasionally the generator will just start up as the power company can use it to help power the grid during peak power times.
Definitely a thought for businesses to consider...
Go and buy from another country.
Argentina, for example, has excellent quality and low prices if you are think about exchange rate.
Rather than building Googleplexes why aren't the IT mavens hiring P2P guys to build decentralized systems to farm out work to the desktops already sitting around?
Seastead this.
Actually, a lot of the delays have been caused by the war. It takes time to build these generators, and when the war started a lot of the generators that were ready to ship were taken by the military (eminent domain) and shipped off to the middle east. Some of the new production also gave them priority. Everyone else has to wait...
Our datacenter has about 24,000 sq feet of raised floor (not huge by datacenter standards) and we have 2 x 2MegaWatt Generators (as well as redundant utility feeds). To say that 2MW is too much power in this case shows your lack of understanding of what a "MAJOR data center with plenty of redundancy" means.
Prior to working here, I was an engineer at one of the main datacenters for a big Texas based IT provider (think Ross Perot) and their datacenter had over 100,000 sq feet of raised floor. At last count, they were up to 9 750KW generators and badly in need of more.
While we're on it, cooling towers do not provide chilled water, they provide CONDENSER WATER, and I promise you that they would not be able to satisfy your cooling needs in a MAJOR datacenter for 2 hours in the event of a chiller failure.
I can appreciate your being surprised at the power/cooling requirements of a datacenter, but don't let your experience at 1 "datacenter" fool you into thinking you know about all datacenters, as like most things, they are not all created equal. In truth, what is one man's datacenter is another man's "server room".
Maybe this will cause companies waiting for generators to look to more environmentally friendly/different back-up power solutions. Don't forget, once you have the generators, you have to pay for diesel fuel, and the maintence. At that cost, you could probably have some sort of solar/battery array for the same amount, with less cost for the upkeep. Plus, what about the money your company could loose with power failures/outages during the year that you're waiting for the generator(s).
That's only about 10,000 2-U rackable servers, not counting the AC and lighting. It's currently in fashion to install a 20 - 80 KW unit for your new McMansion.
I've been in lots if data centers large enough to accomodate that many hosts.
The question might be - Oh, no, are we overbuilding data center capacity AGAIN?
The other question - these genrators aren't in the basement, are they.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I would bet that a datacenter probably uses as much electricity as a small skyscraper. Because of the high equipment densities, a 1-story datacenter filled with racks probably has HVAC requirements that are like a multi-story office building filled with cubes. IT doesn't have the same lighting requirements, but that's not nearly the draw that heating and cooling are.
Actually, I bet that in many situations, if you just pulled the plug on a 'center, very bad things might happen to the equipment, aside from the obvious ones like data loss. Even without the machines actually producing any more heat (because they're off), without cooling air being forced through them, in very high density racks I wonder if the residual heat might not build up to rather high temperatures and become a problem; damaging hard drives or other temperature-sensitive parts.
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From all the datacenters relocating outside the US? That seems to be the trend in my locale.
That's a sunk cost if you have to have the generators either way, as a backup to the mains power.
However the additional expense of running the generators continuously (which is probably in excess of their rated duty cycle, if they're "emergency" generators) versus just having them sitting there and exercising them weekly, ought to be factored into the cost.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Modern Generators" as you call them do not happily sync together under load. If you have PLC Controlled Switchgear associated with them, then you will be able to sync them, and even then they'll never be perfect. If one generator lags and becomes a "slave" it also becomes a load to the "master" generator, thus reducing your available power to the critical load. It's definitely not as simple as just dropping a few generators in a row and wiring them to the same buss, I assure you.
Also, a 1MW generator is pretty large, as is the switchgear and any fuel storage tanks associated with it. As far as the UPS's, true, they will take care of brownouts and frequency errors, but you want the power coming in (either utility or generator) to be as clean as possible so that you're not beating the shit out of your batteries every few minutes to take care of spikes. Batteries do have a shelf life and they're not cheap.
They make single wind chargers now well over 2 megawatts. I have never seen one, just pics, large dudes. So, one of those, one gas turbine, one diesel, plus grid tie, then you got fuel supply covered as well as generating capacity covered multiple ways.
Actually it was in fashion a few years ago when tere were electricity shortages to install smallish gas turbine gensets to run your house or business independently. I remember reading about a McDonalds in Chicago that had done such a thing.
As "the infrastructure" continues to fall apart, and energy prices are bound to spike again, and turbine technology becomes cheap and ubuquitous, I can see diesel turbines replacing IC as the power source of choice, even down to the hundreds of KW range.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I see a lot of posts that 2MW is a lot of power. Perhaps.
There are many facilities out there with 10-30 2MW generators. I personally worked on a facility that had 18. 12 were for "critical load", that is, things fed via UPS's. This included all of the servers and networking equipment, the NOC, emergency lighting, fire supression systems and soforth. The other 6 were for "emergency load", these were things that did not need UPS protection (they could go down), just not for long. Virtually all of this load was air conditioning. So when the power went out the A/C's went off and came back 30-60 second later on generator, while the servers and all stayed up the same time.
While big, it's far from the largest facility out there.
Now, why would you buy one generator? Well, many buildings use bus variations (the whole N+1, or N+2 thing). So you build your data center for all 18 generators (as above), but install 6 and 3, or half the capacity. You now wait for the building to fill to 25-30%, and then start adding more generators, one at a time. However, they now have to be matched to the other generators.
Now, why are data center generators special? Well, to switch from one AC source to another the two loads must be approximately in phase (there is some tolerance, but it's small). So in order to be able to switch between generators, switch from UPS to generator, and all that other stuff you need additional circuitry to keep the generator just so. While the engine block and generator were the same as say a diesel locomotive, there were some additional sensors, lots of additional computer control, and some additional quick start features.
Most sites want their backup generators to be "ready to load" in 15-30 seconds. Indeed, several manufacturers make 10 second ready to load units. However that requires things like engine oil and coolant heaters that basically keep the entire motor warm 24x7x365. These are not found on industrial generators or locomotives.
So, they really are special, high tech tight tolerance units designed to work in a system. When you connect to WoW or your other large game you're probably one one of a thousand servers run by that company, who is one of but hundreds of companies in the larger colo facilities. It's not uncommon to find 50,000 servers under a single roof. So you need lots, and lots, of 2MW generators.
What are you thinking?!?
You don't want a single, big, expensive generator which may or may not fire up when you need it. You want back-up generation with the same high-availability low-cost characteristics as your server farm.
You want Generac Power Systems' Modular Power System (MPS).
Yes, I'm totally biased. I helped design the controllers.
-- Rick Miller, Software Engineer. (See "/usr/src/linux/CREDITS")
If you put the datacenter in a normally cool locale, then you'd notice an immediate energy savings without having to do much of anything. The equipment would probably keep the building warm (probably overly warm, if you didn't vent to the outside) and if you designed the cooling system to draw in air from the outside, the actual amount of ventilation required (in CFM) might decrease.
I don't know the formula, but I bet that somebody could probably tell you how many CFM of air at 70F you'd need to equal a 1 CFM flow at 40F. Probably depends on the heat capacity of the air, I assume.
In general, cooling is energetically 'cheaper' than heating -- a good air conditioner can "make" 3 or 4 units of cool using one unit of electricity (in other words, they can move several Joules of heat from one place to another using 1 Joule of energy), while even the most efficient heater can only approach 1 to 1. (Electric heaters are 100% efficient, for all practical purposes.) However, if whatever activity you're planning on doing inside the building produces lots of heat anyway that you need to get rid of (computers), rather than requiring heat as an input (painting), then it might make sense to place yourself in a cold location and take advantage of the "free cool."
I bet Canada would be a great place for datacenters, if you had the backbone capacity and redundancy. Right now, those are really the key features in placing big datacenters; they pop up like toadstools wherever you have a lot of fat pipes coming together. Take that out of the mix, though, and an urban or exurban environment is the last place you'd want to build one. The middle of nowhere is actually a far better place.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I was aware that diesel locomotives did the engine->generator->electric motor thing, however I thought that the generators and motors were DC, not AC. Perhaps that is not the case, or perhaps each locomotive has a power inverter as well. Please enlighten us.
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Ok so an old 6800 (circa 2001) took up an entire rack, and made a great space heater, but could only have 24 processors. Now with multi-cpu blades servers running at 3X the speed you can put around 8X the processors or so in the same space which far outweighs any advances in energy efficiency. The problem is that your old data center won't likely be able to handle that power (if it can cool). The focus to date has been on increasing CPU density but that has advanced much faster than the datacenter's ability to keep up with the associated increase in power and cooling.
2 MW really isn't all that much, in terms of enterprise-level power systems. That would run about 1000 homes, or a smallish skyscaper.
However, thinking of the power source in terms of the number of computers you can run is missing a very important part of the picture: COOLING. Refridgeration can account for half or more of the power requirements for modern datacenters. That's the downside to the drive towards more computation in a smaller footprint: much higher cooling requirements. And these buildings are not typically built (nor are the racks typically arranged) for optimal cooling. Far from it. There are enormous efficiency benefits to be had, if the designers would just slow down long enough to think things through.
Rocky Mountain Institute's Design Recommendations for High Performance Data Centers offers up a number of suggestions that could drop computing power requirements by a factor of four using current technology more intelligently deployed. With the development of new servers designed for efficiency, they forcast a potential for 10x energy savings. (Granted, this is vs. 2003 technology, but even so.) That translates into much reduced cooling requirements.
They also suggest designing the data centers to generate their power on site, using high-duty-cycle generators or solid-oxide fuel cells, and use the grid as a backup. Then you can capture the waste heat from the generation system, and use it to drive an adsorption chiller to provide a large part of your cooling needs (which have been greatly reduced by aforementioned efficiecy measures). The end result is higher reliability, lower capital costs, and MUCH lower operating costs.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Your product is interesting but there is a difference. The reason the cost per KW of engines over about 500KW starts to rise is that they are designed for very long life. Unlike gas engines, where when you get outside the cylinder size range of about 50-500cc things start to go downhill, Diesels scale to enormous cylinder sizes but, because the mean piston speed needs to be constant, power goes up as the 2/3 root of cylinder volume. Mass scales more closely to volume, so mass rises faster than output. However, the benefit is that the wear life of a larger cylinder is much greater, because it can tolerate larger amounts of linear wear before blowby becomes excessive.
The implications are that while the cost per installed KW of your multi-engine plant is about the same as that of a single 2MW unit (because of the additional switching and control gear) it will not have the same service life and its lifetime cost per KW is higher.
Correctly and honestly, you describe your generators as backup. But larger units in the 2MW and over range can be used as primary generators. That's the difference. As somebody else has observed elsewhere, large units can be remote controlled by electricity utilities for handling load peaks. This means that their asset utilisation can be much higher than standby generators in well designed stationary applications. The lifetime cost per KWH of a backup generator can be very high because its first cost is amortised over low running hours.
Fact is, 2MW isn't a big Diesel. It's portable power (as used in trains and boats.) That's why supply and demand is likely to vary according to major events like earthquakes and wars.
Pining for the fjords
This goes round and round slashdot nearly everytime HVAC comes up. Heat pumps are more than 100% electrically efficient. As you said, they're moving heat around rather than directly heating the air. This can work in either direction (warming or cooling a building) and be several times more efficient than straight electric heat as far as your power bill is concerned.
This is totally true; I didn't consider heat pumps.
Actually, I've never understood why they're not more popular in my area. Everyone seems to use gas furnaces, even though they cost a fortune to operate and it never really gets cold enough to make heat pumps prohibitive. (Northern Virginia) There seems to be a bit of Luddism to it...everyone always has used gas, therefore they always will. Maybe as energy gets more expensive, people will come around. If I was building a house here, that's the way I'd certainly go. (Currently I rent, so I'm stuck with their POS gas heater; most of the time I don't even turn it on and just use my computers.)
Anyway, I do think my main point regarding the placement of industries that create waste heat, as opposed to those that require heat as an input, still stands. If you're a datacenter, and have to "buy cool" from the power company via your A/C system, then you might as well go where it's cooler (and where, as you pointed out, you might even be able to reuse or sell your 'waste' heat). If you're an iron foundry or auto-body shop, where you "buy heat" in order to actually do your job, then it makes sense to go where it's warmer or at least temperate.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You think? Kinda like the logic that with the invention of the computer we would be using less paper products, sounds good in theory, but reality is that the use of paper has increased dramatically because of computers. The more powerful processors become the more power they require. Yes we are more efficient but we are also doing more and more, and demanding more and more everyday, growing our economy. The U.S. Economy has grown 20% in the last 4 years, doesn't sound like much? That 20% is equal to China's entire economy. It is the same problem with getting off foreign oil, never going to happen, unless someone discovers a way to bypass known physics. Enjoy the ride America.
Where I used to work, they had 6 diesel locomotive engines, all in a row in a big room. When I went on the tour, they told us we could only stay in there for a minute, because of the possibility of them firing up at any time (the sound would be deafening). Each of the engines sat on an isolated "pad" which reduced vibrations. They told us that was necessary to prevent the harmonics for damaging the building. It was really a beautiful thing :)
In the summer, they would sometimes run them during peak periods. I was told that they generated enough power to run the datacenter (which is one of the largest in the midwest), plus sell enough power back onto the grid to earn a sizeable kickback.
Technology is cool.
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I'm having a hard time imagining that this idea hasn't been thrown around before.
I think one of the major concerns in the article was about lead time. From what I've heard, ever since the hurricane season last year Generac has had much shorter lead times than competitors.
Since our MPS allows different sizes of generators to work together, a customer will never hear our sales people say, "Oh, we don't have any of that size available..." The bigger the installation, the more possible configurations there can be.
It's why Savvis datacenters look like a spaghetti trainwreck on the outside. Just drive past one. they tell you they're "upgrading" instead of "oversold and overheated". If their SAS70 crew only knew....
I would imagine that if you were a very large data center and let the vendors know they could bid on an order for x-thousands of new servers, provided they came stock with DC power supplies instead of AC, you might get some takers. Just a guess though, but as purchase orders scale up, customization might become a little easier to get.
;)
I honestly don't know though, merely contemplating some salesguy at acme servers inc telling is boss that acme data inc wanted 10 thou new servers but he blew them off from that requirement.....
With that said, I wonder if (probably) any big centers are located in old mines or caves that have more reasonable year round cool temps?
I've been the engineer and the project manager (which means freezing in -20F weather with the technician on startup). My job up until Feb06 was installing backup and continuous duty cogen gensets, and my current job is with a company that installs generators running on biomass fuels. The four primary problems that are causing the generator shortage are:
1. New Tier 3 emission requirements for units over 750 bhp. Not all the vendors can make this yet.
2. Construction equipment orders have been on the rise for the last several years, and the same Cat block that can generate 2MW of power can go in some BIG earthmoving equipment. And those companies place orders a year ahead of time for large projects where they either are going to buy or lease the equipment.
3. International construction and generator market has blown up with South America developing and Asia building again along with China. When we complained about our delivery time going from 4 months gradually to a year and a half, our engine rep last year said we were lucky to get one, as they could sell everything to the China building market and wouldn't have to worry about US emissions standards.
4. Plant Capacity. Because of the overbuilding in the last tech boom and our 80's growth being followed by a recession, the suppliers are not building new plants, they're just working the existing ones at max capacity and increasing delivery times. Our two generator packagers/OEMs basicly said that they were at full production and had orders logged to keep full production for the next two years. Most of the plants need 5-10 years of full production to pay back the investment, so until there is either enough of a backlog to keep 2 plants at capacity or management sees potential in capturing the sales of customers that don't do a project because they can't keep the money on hand for 3 years, backlogs will be the rule.
We just put in orders for units that we won't get until the end of 2007 and maybe the beginning of 2008.
One thing about used equipment. You need to know the history of the equipment or plan on a complete rebuild of the generator and insist on witnessing factory testing for switchgear, generators over 1 MW, and anything that is built at a packager. I've gotten units in the field with totally half complete wiring and wrong wiring and had to spend the money on the field techs because the packager doesn't have ring-out in their contract.
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"One point twenty-one jigga-watts?!?!?" -Doc
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Speed your code up by a factor of 10-100, and your data center will
service 10-100 times more users. A fairly easy speed up to achieve
if you carefully design and code using compiled languages, instead
of the usual buzzword oriented design.
The buzzword oriented approach to software design:
Its always got to include Java and XML, but not just
Java, its got to include an entire OS written in Java. Oh and SQL,
everything has to be stored in SQL databases, absolutely everything.
Take your images, serialize the binary data using XML, then cram that
mess into an SQL record, thats the ticket! Sites loading slow? No problem
just throw a few more racks of equipment at it, bandwidth problems between
your ten tons of oracle servers and your room of web servers? No problem
giant conduits full of fiber. A dozen high priests to show off the data
center to investors...
Interesting.
Well, given the price in gas (last winter we were paying upwards of $400 a month in gas alone to heat a single-story, seven-room manufactured house), if I was building, I'd be willing to get a heat pump and use electric oil-filled radiators as a backup if it got so cold that it stopped working completely. (And save the money for the air conditioning in the summertime, when this place turns into a humid suburb of Hell. The fact that I'm not originally from here is probably starting to show...)
As it is, my housemates and I have decided we're not going to use the gas furnace for anything more than the minimum required to keep the pipes from freezing this season. It's old and inefficient enough that by the time the heat gets from the furnace to the living areas of the house, it costs more than just putting a $40 oil-filled electric radiator there does. Plus, you can put the electric rads on timers (some have built-in ones) and control the temperature in different rooms over time. Sure, you can do that with a timed thermostat on your central heat, but the control you get via individual radiators is far more fine-grained. Add an electric blanket on the bed and a ceramic fan-forced heater in the bathroom, and you really don't need to keep the entire house cooking at 72F. (It probably helps that I dislike an ambient temperature greater than about 65F anyway, summer or winter.)
I wonder if as energy prices continue to increase, they'll be more interest in heat pump systems that use heat resovoirs other than the atmosphere; for example the ground below the frost line, or above-freezing water at the bottom of a lake or pond, and additional types of heat pumps designed to function at very low temperatures. Maybe a solution would be to not try and have the same unit do winter heating and summer cooling? It seems like the dual-functionality probably requires some tradeoffs; if you used two separate units, one that was designed for cold-weather operation, pulling heat in, and another that was designed for hot-weather operation, exhausting heat out, maybe they would be more practical in northern climates.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I hesitate to post this as it will put all those diesel generator companies out of business. Get wind turbines and install them horizontally over the boss's chair. The hot air that he spouts will rise and turn the turbine. Since there is usually a really big group of executives full of hot air, add more turbines. There is built in redundancy in this system. I call it executhermal energy.
You can take it a step further by funneling the rising air into the HVAC duct work. It will probably need to pass through a carbon filter to eliminate halitosis, but that is a simple step.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
That's really fascinating, I was not aware that ice tanks were commonly used that way. Using them as "peak storage" to even out the electrical load is a pretty good idea too, in more typical office environments. Probably in areas where the electricity has a "demand charge" component to it (where your rate goes up depending on your maximum power draw at any particular time), it could be economical. Also, I assume that you can replenish them with ice during the night, when the air conditioners are both more efficient and have less load on them. Just a neat idea all around.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."