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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?"
The data center I visit most right now has hot/cold aisles. It looks more like a meat processing center with all the heavy plastic drapes. They go from floor to ceiling every other aisle. On the front of the racks they even put in plastic placeholders for gaps where we don't have equipment installed yet to maximize air flow through the equipment. They did it too, we never even had to ask.
Most of the time we work from the cold aisle with our laptop carts and it is *cold*. The article is confusing because I can't possibly understand why you need to sit with a cart in the hot aisle to work. You can install your equipment and cabling in such a way that you don't need access to the hot aisle for anything other than full server swap outs, cabling swap outs, and that's pretty much it. You can replace the hard drives from the front of the units, and maintenance the server just by pulling it out in front after disconnecting the cables if you need to do so. Most big 4U servers come with cable management arms that allow you to keep "service loops" so that you don't need to disconnect anything to pull the server out on the rails.
Heck, if you need to just get a 15ft networking cable and thread it through into the cold aisle. You don't have to sit in the heat if you don't want to. Although, I'm a big guy and I like the cold it but its funny as hell to see the skinny bastards walking over to the hot aisle to warm up.