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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.
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!
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
That's probably part of the demand for the "data center in a box" concept. With a shortage of engineers to design centers it's an obvious move to try and start mass manufacturing them.
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.
A designer needs to understand how cooling, power and building design affect each other. High density cooling and power management is a different beast. (And disaster management! Redundant power, fire suppression that won't destroy your computers, etc...)
I think that is the point here: Data centers have become large enough that you don't want to just stuff them into a random office building and hope everything will work out fine. Specialization is valuable in this case.
Those of you who have been in data centers have seen forced air cooling that is not used correctly; cabinets not over vent tiles, vent tiles in the middle of the floor, cabinets over air vent tiles but with a bottom in the cabinet so no air flows.
When equipment is nearing end of life and hardly being used, it sits there and turns electricity into heat while doing nothing. There are often a grand mix of cabinet types that do not all make best use of the cooling system, undersized cooling systems, very dense blade style cabinets replacing cabinets that were not so dense unbalances the heat/cooling process in the whole data center. Not to mention what doing so does to the backup power system when needed.
There are hundreds of 'mistakes' made in data centers all over the country. Correcting them and pushing the efficiency of the data center is a big job that not many people were interested in paying for in years gone by.
If you are interested in what you can do for your small data center, try looking at what APC does, or any cabinet manufacturer. They have lots of glossy marketing materials and websites and stuff. There is plenty of information available. Here's a first link for you http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/apc-index.html
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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.
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.
Yeah, except that mass-manufacturing data centers is like designing a 1999 Mazda or a 1956 Jaguar. There are so many factors that are changing regarding how data centers go together, that it's a moving target to get long-lasting designs. In the bad old days, you could get a 20 year life from a data center, and not a lot changed, year to year.
Now data centers can have lots of change-- as the servers themselves change along with equipment that's located in a data center. The -48vdc telephony equipment is now housed there, along with blade server chassis that breathe fire and suck power like an SUV-- let alone the heat generation problems.
Add in mandates of 5-9's availability (a new concept in the computer industry), earthquake, hurricane/tornado/flooding, power grid availability, the liablities of co-los, legal mandates and constraints, and data center design has become a discipline unto itself. It's not necessarily constrained by good personnel, rather it's constrained by the huge number of changes in the industry overall, and the numerous disciplines needed to bring asset life out of a data center investment.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
-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?
- Power - redundancy, and resisiliency as much as 'just having enough'
- Cooling - air conditioning is a BIG deal for a data centre - you need good air flow, and it probably doubles your electric bill.
- Specialist equipment - datacentres are _mostly_ modular, based around 19" racks. But there's exceptions, such as stuff that is 'multi-rack' like tape silos.
- Equipment accessibility - you'll need to add and remove servers, and possibly some really quite big and scary bits of big iron - IIRC A Symmetrix is 1.8 tonnes. You'll need a way to get that into a datacentre, which doesn't involve '10 big blokes' - spacing of your racks might not help
- Putting new stuff in - a rack is 42U high. Right at the top of that rack, is going to require overhead lifting.
- Cabling. Servers use a lot of cables. Some are for power, some are for networking, some are for serial terminals. You've got a mix of power cable, copper cables, fiber cables. They need to fit, they need to be possible to manipulate on the fly, and they need to not break the fibers when you lay them. You also need to be aware that a massive bundle of copper cables is not perfectly shielded, so you'll get crosstalk and intereference. And every machine in your datacentre will have 4 or more cables running into it, probably from different sources, so you need to 'deal' with that.
- Operator access - if that server over there blows up, how to I get on the console to fix it. If I am on the console to fix it, how do you ensure I'm not twiddling that red button over there that I shouldn't be.
- Remote/DR facilities - most datacenters have some concept of disaster planning - things as simple as 'farmer joe dug up the cable to the ISP' all the way to 'plane flew into primary data centre'. These things are relatively cheap and easy to deal with on day one, and utter nightmares to retroengineer onto a live data centre.
- Expansion - power needs change, space needs change, technology changes and
... well, demand for servers increases steadily. It's something to be considered that you will, sooner or later, run out of space, or have to swap out assets.
That's what springs to mind off the top of my head. There's probably a few more things. So yes, civil engineering, but with a splattering of IT contraints and difficulties.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?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
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
Blade servers do end up sharing power supplies, and possibly switches/other gear for efficiency. But the CPUs burn, and the disks turn. Density means that a single rack when loaded up consumes voracious amounts of power and requisite cooling. It's a great idea in a lot of ways, but data centers weren't designed for either the power draw or the chilling needs, let along the weight. Add in the fact that denser instances mean more can die in a single chassis, and there are questions posed by blades that older data centers were just not designed for.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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.
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
Not in this case. It's the Big Stone 2 plant in South Dakota. The locals want it. The environmental elites that live hundreds of miles away are trying to kill it.
New small college data center (in new library) had some of it's design features changed from what ITS requested. The two big ones were 1. Getting rid of the raised floor and putting in carpeting and 2. putting fire sprinkler and building alarm controls behind locked server room door. There was a bit of a political struggle in the college, with the head of the library asserting his authority over IT, since they were in his building. He decided on the changes, as a way of saving money and freeing up 'unneeded space' by not having a separate building controls room. Small school politics are the worst.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Oh yes! Carpet in a server room. I wouldn't even put "NSA carpet" in there -- it has conductive filaments to ground out any EMI.
I had the same several month long arguements in planning our new office. It's expensive. We cannot raise the ceiling (the building HVAC systems are in the plenum.) Do we really need 5ton air handlers. Do we have to have 2 of them. etc. etc. Well, my 12" floor became a 10" floor -- a compromise to make the ramp 2ft shorter, and 2 Lieberts became one because no one listened to my original specs and the landlords wouldn't buy the second one. (those things are expen$ive.)
Btw, that single point of failure failed within *4* months requiring basically the entire office to be shutdown all day to get it fixed. It was over 100F in there in less than an hour.