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Making Data Centers More People-Friendly
1sockchuck writes "Data centers are designed to house servers, not people. This has often meant trade-offs for data center staffers, who brave 100-degree hot aisles and perform their work at laptop carts. But some data center developers are rethinking this approach and designing people-friendly data centers with Class-A offices and amenities for staff and visitors. Is this the future of data center design?"
Maybe it's just me, but doesn't it seem like 100 degree aisles wouldn't be particularly server-friendly either? Just my $.02
For those who want to pay for those amenities.
Seriously! What company is going to pay an extra 10% (guessed figure) on top of the cost so they can have a nice comfy room for their data-rats?
I've never had a temp problem in a data center. Noise? yes, hot? no.
No.
This is a marketing ploy to attract customers to a new data center. Ultimately cost will determine the layout. If a cube is cheaper then cubes it will be. If 100 degree hot aisles saves money vs an 85 degree hot aisle, then they'll run them hotter.
The future of data center design is determined by the lowest denominator common between hardware, humans and cost. Anyone think "people friendly" has a snowball's chance in a 100-degree hot aisle?
In my day Data Centers were at the top of snow mountains which you had to climb barefooted or be turned away. We built them to keep the machinery happy, not the people, whom we preferred behaved like machinery.
We liked our Data Centers the way we liked our women: Bright, White, Antiseptic, and Bitterly Cold.
How getting rid of hand scanners?
I used to work in colo facilities for years and the one thing that always concerned me was some person that had gone through the man trap before me had some awful bacteria/virus on their hands.
If the handle on the toilet in the airport can claim that it has an anti-bacterial coating, do you think the hand scanner manufacturers could do the same?
All the Data Centers I have been working at (USA and Singapore) had some kind of lounge/relaxing room with games, food vending machines, coffees, meeting rooms you can rent, showers, etc. Maybe they just forgot to mention it to their existing customers? Or maybe Equinix (not my company) is doing a better job at taking care of their customers? And they're still aiming at 30% yearly ROE, I can't see where a few dedicated rooms would hurt the bottom line so much.
Haha! We tried this back in 2000 and it didn't work out. Company tanked, got sold for pennies on the dollar. Herakles (new name) is, however, still a really nice facility.
If you've got remote management set up properly, the only reason you ever even need to go to the data center is due to some kind of hardware failure. There's no sense paying the extra money a place like this will have to charge (to recoup the cost of all those extra amenities) for colo space if you only need to physically visit your servers maybe once or twice a year.
Parent is Goatse!
Hey buddy, can i bum a karma? ~}CinderellaManson{~
The folks in India won't care how hot or cold it is in the data centers over here.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I manage an R&D lab with a few hundred racks. We constantly swap out hardware for testing. This makes sitting in the lab the most efficient way of getting things done. Unfortunately my work space where I'm currently sitting reads 90F and I'm wearing noise canceling headphones, which squeeze my head into oblivion after an hour or two. We're working on redesigning a storage room into office space to improve our quality of life. Our goal is to work within a few yards of the gear. As long as an office space is nearby we'll be happier, be able to hear each-other talk, and not feel like we're driving down an Arizona highway in a convertible at 60mph.
Designing the entire lab around a few working spaces? That seems far fetched. Most data centers choose location: cheap land, power, and cooling before the words "workspace" is even thought of. If an efficient hot/cold aisle scenario works out and a room is nearby, then great convert a closet.
I've worked in several data centers. An IBM one had air cooled servers (push cold air into the floor, and every rack has a massive fan pulling cold air up from the floor. It was about 20C day and night. The floor tiles would occasionally break which caused problems when pulling skids of bills over them (it was a phone bill processing and print facility). We would also go through 30 tons of paper per month (2x 1000lb skids of paper per day). There was a lot of paper dust in the place, and the paper was perforated, but on the long side (not on the short side like pc printer paper) because it would tear apart if it was ran through on the short side. There were tractor holes too, but they weren't perforated. Rotary cutters would cut off the tractor holes. The paper went through some of the equipment at about 60 miles per hour. The printers were in general, slower (IBM 3900 laser printers), as they could only print 229 pages per minute. A 2200 sheet 35 pound box of paper would go from full to empty in about 9 1/2 minutes. Fire prevention was Halon. We were told that if the Halon goes off, you probably won't die from the Halon snuffing you out, but rather the floor tiles flying up and severing body parts (they were about 2 1/2 feet square, made of aluminum about 1 inch thick, but only about 10 pounds each). I worked in another data center that had no windows. If the power went off (and it did once, but not when I was on shift), everything went black. No emergency backup lights. The room was about 80 feet wide, and at least 150 feet long, with rack and servers galore (2 operators, more than 300 machines), including DEC Alpha boxen, HP HPUX boxen, PC's, network archive servers, etc. Good luck feeling your way out of that one. While the company was very picky about losing data and running jobs at night, their main interest was making money, and if that involved cutting a power line (tech cable) to put in a road to move product temporarily, . In general, data centers are built to house computers. Operators are a second thought. If there is a problem, bosses yell at operators. Is it up yet? How about now? When? ... and if bosses come in with guests for a dog and pony, operators are chattle (it would be good if you went away somewhere). If there is a problem.... whats the problem, what did you do?
Our data centers also had customer-friendly space. I think it was mostly inside the "show ID to a guard" area, but it was as important a part of the design as the racks and cages.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Not the future. Didn't you get the memo? Capitalism says the cheapest is best, and amenities cost money. You might see some for the visitors (gotta keep the client happy), but you think they'll pay to keep the place cool for the admins? Not a chance.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You forgot to tell them to get off your lawn.
not useing rent a cop security is good!
If you have some things that need certain conditions, and other things that need different conditions, then you have a problem.
Fortunately, I have a solution. It's called putting a wall between them, you fucktards.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Only in those situations where it makes for additional income.
This concept has been a growing trend over the last 10 years, it's nothing new which is why I question the author's sudden desire to post about this. It costs you in the bottom line, you pay more for your colo because of the wasted "office" space (which never gets used). I'm friends with some sysadmins who work at a large colo in Southern California with these facilities, and they say these premium offices almost never get used, and often end up being where they have their company parties where they play big movies on the projection screen, all at the expense of their customers.
All I can say is, you idiots are paying for this crap. I personally have my servers in a colo with NO office overhead or anything silly like that, and I have had my servers there over 6 year now happily. If this facility started this trend, I would move my servers immediately.
In my experience people keep the datacenter way too cold. If the equipment runs fine at 70F, then set the CRAC to that temperature. If the hot aisle is working right, everything will be cooled within specifications.
I want a pony.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I've been renting facility space in a number of data centers over the last fifteen years, including Exodus (remember them?), IBM and Equinix. In particular Equinix facilities have always provided meeting rooms, work areas, (seriously locked-down) access terminals, great bathrooms and showers for visiting techs for at least 5-7 years. OK, the actual cage areas are pretty cold, but that's the nature of the beast -- I wouldn't want my equipment to overheat. Equinix also has tools you can checkout if you forgot yours or were missing something critical, and racks of screws, bolts, optical wipes, common cable adapters, blue Cisco terminal cables... just in case. (Other than paying them for service, not affiliated with or owning stock in Equinix. But perhaps I should have.)
I would always look forward to the free machine hot-chocolate when visiting for work assignments.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
This troll was good, though my favorites are more like "My boss asked me to spend $5 million upgrading the machine room but I've never done this before, so do you have any advice? Should I include comfy chairs?" or "I'm considering upgrading my skills, do you think it would be worth it to learn Javascript or should I just go to grad school at MIT?" Or sometimes, "I'm having a big fight with my boss, can you give me some evidence that Erlang is really the programming language of the future?" I love slashdot.
Heat: Data centers should be cool. Everyone wants to do things as cheaply as possible, so they spot cool the racks instead of circulating the air and cooling the entire room. Nothing short of abandoning this practice will remove the "it sucks to be in here" factor. The problem isn't so much that it's 100 degrees, but that it's 100 degrees on one side of the rack and 40 degrees on the other. Spend a bit more on cooling costs and get that to 80/60 or even 90/50 and workers will be much less miserable (and equipment will fail less often!). It doesn't have to be a flat "RUN THE HVAC HARDER" solution either.
Run shit efficiently (spot cooling) 24/7.
Something breaks? Whatever alert that triggered the SMS to the on-call employee that tells him to come in and fix it can also trigger the HVAC to do a bit more work to make things more comfortable. Scheduled maintenance is even easier. When work is done, go back to miser mode.
As for noise, the answer is so fucking easy. Larger fans. It boggles my mind to see servers using 80mm, 60mm, and smaller fans for the various components.
Cut that shit out. Your 1U and 1/2U and Blade style shit might not have much leeway, but bigger, slower fans are certainly an option on everything 2U and up.
But as long as cost is king, nothing will change.
If you have a datacenter large and serious enough that you've got a full hot/cold aisle setup, deafening fans, etc. rather than just a rack frame in a closet somewhere, people being in there is supposed to be unusual. Unless a piece of hardware is being swapped out, as fast as your screwdrivers will carry you, or somebody fucked up in a network-unrecoverable way, why are there humans inside at all?
I work in a data center built in 1999 and it has rooms for visitors and conference rooms, as well as "cube land" for staff.
The only thing hot in the many data centers I toured were the saleswomen. Every single one of them, young, female and HOT! No exceptions.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
If it does, then the answer is a resounding no. NO. NO!!! NoooOOOOOOooooOOOOOOooooOOOOOOooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
With whole things moving to the universe of virtualization and heavy encryption technology the location and security of the physical machines become non-issues. there is no need for owning the hardware in the future unless you had specific needs and if you are are the type requires special needs then you can not risk not to have in-house data-center where you probably have $$$ and the thing is high profile. Um...google & apple don't they have their own data-center? Enough said...and move along, as there is nothing to be discussed.
It's not that I don't like humans, hell I married one. However humans are unpredictable. Applications want and need predictable hardware to live on. Even in a "CLOUD" with floating VMs that fly around like Unicorns you want stable predictable hardware underneath.
Humans trip on things, excrete fluids and gases, need oxygen, light, are temperature sensitive and depending on who's stats you believe cause up to 70% of outages.
I see convergence, virtualization etc as a chance to finally get humans OUT of the data center. Build it out, cable everything. Then seal it. Interaction does NOT require physical access. And a team of dedicated obsessive compulsive robots or humans can replace memory, drives etc.
Data Centers need to be human FREE zones. Not the common room in a dorm.
My gear is at Peer1's new Data Center in Toronto. They have nice work areas outside of the POD to work on your gear, where it is quite and you have plenty of space etc. Plus they have a nice couch with a huge TV if you need a break. The staff have nice offices too. Although there are never any paper towels in the washroom.
http://www.peer1.com/hosting/toronto_data_center.php
Data centers are utility rooms and serve a utility purpose. Aside from the showoff trips for the clients, they are probably factored as such and will be closer to a boiler room than an office. Ever see a nicely decked out boiler room?
the bandwidth is just not there for that right now do you want pay the costs to get a fios like network in the areas that are still just on ADSL?
I not only don't wash my hands I wipe my butt with my fingers then wipe my fingers off with TP.
I like to sneak into the bathrooms early in the morning and rub one out over the sink handles in both bathrooms. Those aren't 'water' spots.
I'm a hand shaking motherfucker and I work with you.
Gen 4 data centers: ITPACS - no HVAC, no aisles, you never touch a server. Automated provisioning and data transfer means when a server starts experiencing too many the vm gets shut down, moved, and the server shut down; when n servers are shut down the container is shut down and replaced. No one looks at an error log to see what the problem is - no one cares - just send it back to the vendor for refurbishing.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msdatacenters/archive/2011/02/01/datacenter-efficiency.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/84f44749-1343-4467-8012-9c70ef77981c
But then I read this and realised they were using the backwards Fahrenheit measurement.
Now here I agree, 38 Degrees is not too hot so long as you aren't working there 8 hours a day. I'm sure datacentre staff have a nice climate controlled cubical to go back to so that is a non issue.
BTW, the strangest rack I've ever come across was one we deployed to a mine in Mongolia. Yes, you can get self contained racks with their own heater.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Shouldn't it be windows friendly since they have to be there first Tuesday of the month.
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
I managed a data center. Temperatures like that radiating from servers is bad, bad news. That is an obvious bad airflow problem.
Plus, there is emerging technology to use sound waves for refrigeration. I wonder when they'll deploy it for data centers?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Most of the dust our homes and offices collect is dead skin (citation needed). So, please, keep the meatbags out of the datacenter so I dont have to come later and replace all the failing fans, which in turn let the hardware overheat, and the server fail, and now you cant access your pretty lolcat pictures. So you get out of the house, bored, and start socializing with people. Next thing you all have weird ideas and want to overthrow the government. The government responds nuking his own people, because governments don't remember why they are there in the first place. THEN the other nations use human rights to fight the government of that country.
There, you FUCKED UP THE WORLD.
-Bunn
Oh good Lord, no... Given how often my tape robots break. They jam, they get confused... The last thing I need with a downed server is some robot trying to crimp it in two because a roller got worn and lacked grip. Plus, when the robot breaks, how hard will it be for a human to get in and do things manually? Especially when the mechanism is from the low bidder, because the execs will never pay for a good one...
I had access to nearly all of the comm platforms we used, and most required multi level access to get in (outer door, inner door) These rooms were very convenient for "off the record" discussions when it ws concerning info that not everyone should hear, or regarded sensitive information. To sanitize an op center is to remove its effectiveness. We have to stop allowing the MBA types to dictate what a dev or system center is all about.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
That's boiling water temperture! I can just imagine the piles of cooked sysadmins there.
I'll second your opinion on Equinix. The data centers I have frequented of theirs even have arcade machines in a breakroom. I rarely see places as well-managed or designed as theirs.
Are people still using crash carts for routine maintenance, in this day of ubiquitous KVM? In our datacenter every other row has a desk with two terminals with access to the KVM for those two rows. Unfortunately it's in the cold aisle, which makes it a little chilly to work there if you didn't bring a coat. I have been known to take breaks in the nearest hot aisle to warm up.
A crash cart should be used for diagnosis and installs. KVM for everything else.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
For some App, Data Center RAID works well. Build 10 low cost data centers, mirror 5->5, run like the wind.
However, due to the transactional nature of some Applications this is not true.
For example, Google's model works great for search.
However it didn't keep those 150,000 users from loosing their data did it?
Once the transaction is done, you can sync the results, but a failure mid transaction can be VERY bad.