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Data Center Designers In High Demand
Hugh Pickens writes "For years, data center designers have toiled in obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems but now people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand. 'The data center energy problem is growing fast, and it has an economic importance that far outweighs the electricity use,' said Jonathan G. Koomey of Stanford University. 'So that explains why these data center people, who haven't gotten a lot of glory in their careers, are in the spotlight now.' The pace of the data center build-up is the result of the surging use of servers, which in the United States rose to 11.8 million in 2007, from 2.6 million a decade earlier. 'For years and years, the attitude was just buy it, install it and don't worry about it,' says Vernon Turner, an analyst for IDC. 'That led to all sorts of inefficiencies. Now, we're paying for that behavior.'" On a related note, an anonymous reader contributes this link to an interesting look at how a data center gets built.
Qualified Professionals in demand, news at 11
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
"The pace of the data center build-up is the result of the surging use of servers, which in the United States rose to 11.8 million in 2007, from 2.6 million a decade earlier." This number surprised me, but leaning toward shock that the rise isn't sharper. Supergiant companies like Google alone and all the data centers needed just to host websites today would make me believe more servers are needed. Does anyone else think this number is low?
I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar
Get some folding card tables, throw yer servers on there, then get yerself a extension cord and a couple of power strips to give ya enough outlets offa those two plugs in th' wall, and get yerself one of them fans from Walmart ta blow over 'em if yer feelin fancy. Voila. Them college kids think they're so smart, that wasn't hard at all. You can even get a bucket of water in case anything catches fire!
Do they constrain the end user to particular hardware, or is it just basic civil engineering?
I can see that a well planned installation can reduce cooling costs, but if Customer A insists on having his Superdome rather than a more energy efficient alternative, what does the designer do then?
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
really want respect, all they have to do is send an urgent email to the ceo that the dilithium crystals are deteriorating, and that the antimatter containment fields are failing, and we can't take much more of this captain
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There is such a thing as a tesseract
This is only a problem because the power grid has become very fragile.
Electricity generation hasn't grown ahead of demand due to government meddling, atom-ophobia, and environmentalist obstruction in the courts and on planning boards.
The rolling blackouts will be coming soon. It'll start with small ones. Then everyone will buy battery backups that draw a lot of power to recharge once power is restored. This will cause the duration of the periodic blackouts to go from a few minutes to a few hours in about 2 years.
Not long after that, we'll start building power generation capacity in the US again.
The only "glory" we'd receive in the data center is when something goes wrong. That is the only time we ever got noticed.
Only now they want people like myself? Screw that. I gave up on that long ago when it was a dead end.
There is a growing area of interest in so-called "Green IT" (mostly due to inevitable regulations), and the first area being looked at is data center organization. It's always the first stat a consultant firm throws out, because it's relatively easy to show significant cost savings in such an environment (just by reorganizing the appliances to distribute heat in a different manner).
The BOFH cares about important things:Like service:
So, besides electricity usage, what else should you care about? How about heat? Your room can't be too hot (you can send all the heat to the swimming pool in the fitness centre...).
What about wires? Both a OHS issue, and a potential to kill off half your servers if you trip over an exposed power cord or network line. So you lay them under the floor?
Complicated stuff this...
I wank in the shower.
"who haven't gotten a lot of glory in their careers"
Has any IT Professional really gotten any glory?
It sounds like theres still a lot of energy efficiency to be gained from our data centers according to the article.
One has to wonder about what's going to happen when they start hitting the wall for improving that situation. The excessive growth doesn't seem likely to slow down. Eventually we'll hit high efficiency but the usage will just keep going up and up worldwide.
I can't help but fear that when that sort of thing happens many will see it as a reason to slow down the advancement of society in the name of their new environmentalist religion.
Companies with full data centers and in need of more servers are turning to virtualization technologies to increase their server density, reduce their physical server deployment, and improve efficiency in cooling, hardware maintenance, and administration.
It's amazing to see the differences VMware has made in my career in just a few short years... going from deploying hardware servers in weeks to a virtual in seconds.
I don't understand the peculiar emphasis the New York Times places on "endangering" the power grid. Even though a data center uses a lot of electricity, it's a high value operation that needs a stable power supply. What's wrong with the idea of paying more to insure that your power supply is sufficiently stable for your needs? The power company accepting those checks can then work on delivering that power. It's like saying that I'm somehow responsible for the stability of the oil production and distribution infrastructure because I drive a car. Perhaps, if I tweak my engine just so, I can engineer a democratic transformation of Saudi Arabia. I'll see if changing the oil does the trick.
At some point, you have to realize that the consumer, no matter how big, isn't responsible for the supply of resources by another party. If there's a problem with how those resources are supplied, be it fixed price (regardless of demand) power transmission lines, pollution, or deforestation, then that problem should appear as an increase in cost to the consumer. If it isn't, then it's a problem with how the resource is distributed, not a problem with the consumer.
Sound proof booth!
That way, the server dude who is wrangling my server issue CAN HEAR ME when he calls me, elbow deep in whirring fans, spinning disks and humming thingees. Even if he listens, gives me a BRB, puts me on hold and dives into the machines.
Or if not feasible, maybe the server dudes could wear priestly robes made of this stuff
Instead of everyone hiring their own designer and doing a one off solution, go for the data center in a shipping container. Cost you less than the architects will charge you for thr building design, and a proper industrial design can make the HVAC more efficient and save lots of $$ in the long run.
Statesman
There has been a shortage of architectural engineers for the past two decades. I say architectural engineers because very few mechanical engineers go into HVAC, and very few electrical engineers do power systems. It doesn't seem quite as bad structurally.
It us a shame because it really has a lot of great career opportunities.
Data center work is just a subset of that-- it is hard to find people with the experience, but not impossible to train.
-1 not first post
I use to have a few friends who worked for UUNET in Richardson TX. After Worldcom bought them and then the scandel happened their datacenter was reduced to a skeleton crew (including security). My buddy worked nights so some weekends I'd drive up to Richardson from Dallas with some beer and he'd sneak me into the datacenter through a door that the smokers used and we'd hang out, drink, and download movies/watch pron. Good times.
Their UPS was pretty impressive. It was about a 2 thousand square foot room full of what looked like car batteries. I didn't like to go in there, I don't like being around large, uninsulated, potential. (I was electrocuted pretty badly as a kid once)
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
While I admit that these datacentres are huge and get a lot of publicity, thus a lot of pressure to design right and "green" I don't think that level of advanced knowledge is typical for SMBs and even most non-IT centric businesses regardless of size.
In practice a company has a few servers and one or two system admins, then they grow, staff leaves, they start thinking about different technologies, required software changes etc. What they end up with is a few vendors servers, a few vendors disk arrays probably a few flavors of networking etc.
In short the "real world" problem for the majority of companies/sys-admins isn't the very academic concept of building a single purpose datacentre, but handling growth and change. I'm yet to see a good reference for how to handle this. At best I see vendors showing how great there new server/rack combination is in isolation, Another popular thing is the ever popular look how low our power needs per FLOP are for a data centre based on our products. Yeah like we are likely to use identical systems for databases as we do for LDAP, and the same one for a fileserver as we use for a MPI cluster.
Anyways, does anyone know a good reference to deal with these "real world" problems?
All of this crazy crap is necessary because
a) Stoopid computer parts can't just sit outside and work right.
b) Cheap heartland desert acres are beloved by accountants.
No roof == no heat problem. If there's wind. And you're not in the sahara.
If only my data center was water-resistant...
Data center employment often comes up in discussions of economic development. Many communities are eager to attract data center projects, but struggle to define the economic benefits of these facilities. Jobs have always been the primary benchmark by which economic development projects are measured. Incentive packages offered by state and local governments are often based on the number of full-time jobs created by a new business. And do data centers really hire locally, or do trained data center engineers migrate from other existing data center hubs? In some cases, local officials try to stipulate local hires, which is a sticky wicket.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Ok, here's how it's going to work out...
...we will call them "ENGINEERS"
We can send people to college and have them study things like thermodynamics, the flow of air and water in a system, physics, electricity, scale, and perhaps even a little economics. (Things that would be useful for data center design)
And here's the real kicker: They can APPLY what they have learned in classrooms and labs to actual mechanical and electrical systems in a datacenter!
Wow, that was rough sailing for a while there.
Note, however, that this does not solve the problem of nobody wanting to PAY these "engineers" a real salary to build out their $50 million data-center.
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
It's not just data center designers that are in demand. There are a ton of listings for data center managers at the Data Center Jobs site.
On the "how a data center gets built" front, last week I had a tour of a new $250 million data center facility in Virginia that is getting ready to open later this month. The facility manager provided a walk-through of the power and cooling infrastructure, explaining the company's approach to designing these systems for energy efficiency and scale. I shot video, which is now posted online. The data center operator, Terremark, separated most of the electrical infrastructure from the IT equipment, putting them on separate floors and housing the generators in a separate facility. They have 11 generators now, but will have 55 Caterpillar 2.25-megawatt units when the entire complex is finished.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
They've already taken over the governorship of California and have many more ambitions.
Nope. It's the NIMBYs because they're afraid that their home values will go down. They just get the environmentalists on board for the free legal help and credibility.
They'd do better to buy a couple of IBM mainframes.
One thing I've learned from my 20-odd years of experience is that a career in IT is volatile. Your specialty will go up and down in value over the years as globalization, fads, and technology changes ebb and flow.
The problem is that if you have a family, such volatility can be problematic. Possible solutions are to save during the good times (nearly impossible if you are married), or be a generalist, such as the only IT person at a small company or department. Generalists tend not to be paid well, but they do seem to weather downturns or paradigm changes better. It's a trade-off.
Table-ized A.I.
Here's another inside peek, and a spam for my employer:
http://scobleizer.com/2008/03/13/a-real-business-leader/
It's about Rackspace's new datacenter in San Antonio.
~W
sig?
What is all this computing infrastructure doing that's useful? Other than advertising delivery?
I don't get it. Besides "think of the Polar Bears", I can't see why we don't just move all our data centers to the arctic. We can pump oil right out of the ground and burn it for the electricity needed to power the units. We don't need AC just some air pumps to push the cold air through the building. That solves two problems right there.
;)
1)We can now pump oil out of the national reserves in Alaska
2)We don't have to work very hard to cool the data centers.
Win Win if you ask me
Much like the unintended consequences of the ethanol disaster, people who want to go paperless to save the trees have to look at the non-trivial task of supplying energy needs to a data center. When you realize this, the importance of green IT becomes apparent. Whether or not global warming is indeed the threat that they say it is, developing energy solutions that don't rely on fossil fuels is imperative. Basically, we need to use more nuclear power!
Actually, the above article is kind of thick on fluff (??), but here's the video:
http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/rackspace-tears-new-headquarters
~W
sig?
It's by design. For some reason, "engineering" is a specialty profession with huge barriers to entry. The shortage of "architectural engineers" is likely due to the fact that most colleges wouldn't even think of offering such an obscure degree.
No one would dream of hiring, say, a physicist to design a datacenter. Yet a physics degree in most universities differs from an "architectural engineering" degree by just a handful of classes. And ultimately the physicist would probably do a better job.
Speaking of jobs, I'm surrounded by engineers. But I'm not an engineer. I'm a Linux expert. So let me tell you what I do at my current job: Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I've taken the tasks I'm charged with, some of which constitute "engineering", and put them into a handful of programs. My programs read AutoCAD drawings, find errors, and automatically generate installation, operation & maintenance manuals for custom industrial equipment. The end result is the same as if an engineer had sat down to write a manual from scratch, which is the way it was done before I got here.
Actually, I won't even go that far. My results are better. My results are faster. My results are consistent. My programs find design errors that no engineer would waste their time trying to find. My programs don't waste time reinventing the wheel.
I just push a button every now and then. That leaves time for me to hassle with IT for more disk space and a faster computer and, of course, read Slashdot. The IT dept. is probably also reading Slashdot right now, and thinking about ways they can outsource their servers to a datacenter somewhere. It's a good thing there aren't enough datacenters for them to do that, because that would probably make my programs slower.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"