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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.
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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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.
- 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?
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
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.
While it may appear that you don't have to work hard to cool the data centers, you will have to work hard to humidify them if you do not want your equipment to die. This is a non-trivial cost and is the reason the "free cooling" (taking in outside air to cool a data center) is often not free.
One answer may be heat wheels, but they are fairly new and unproven in the data center space. Take a look at http://www.kyotocooling.com/