Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
100 degree hot isles are too cold. Hot isles should be the temperature near the maximum component tolerance of the parts in the server. If a part has a maximum temperature of 150 degrees, and runs happily at 120 degrees, the hot isle should be 120 degrees. This way the cooling efficiency is the highest.
See Google and SGI (Rackable) container designs.
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/04/the-beast-unveiled-inside-a-google-server.ars
As you can see from the photo there, all the cables in the front. No need to get behind it where the hot isle is.
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.
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.
Unless you've lived in a bubble your whole life, you're probably going to be OK...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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?
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/
Only in those situations where it makes for additional income.
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.
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
Air intake is from the cool aisle, not hot aisle. Essentially, GP is saying that if the hot aisle is anything lower than 120F, there is extra air-conditioning getting into the cool aisle that shouldn't (waste of cool air). It's more of a health gauge at that end of the computer, kinda like digestion: you make sure you eat well (habitually check the air temperature of the cool side to make sure it's cool enough), and you occasionally look at your stool for corn/blood (see if hot aisle is warm enough) to make sure everything's working as it should.
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.
You would be OK, none of my coworkers have died of dyssenthery yet...
Now more seriously, relax. Look at how people has historically lived. How long have we had drinkable and controlled water in our home? Or have been almost be assured a john (it is how it is called?) nearby when we need it? And you are probably better feed, have had more vaccines and have acces to more and better physicians than 99,9% of the rest of mankind that has ever been. And even with those disavantages, most of these people did not die from illness (and many of the worst epidemics have been linked with periods of crisis, war, and the like that caused famine that weakened the population). And you are mostly surrounded by healthy people, the sicker staying at home or going to an hospital.
The fact that there are spots in TV telling you to buy something every time you sneeze does not mean you are in any way weaker than those people(This is no medical advice. If you tomorrow sneeze and die, I deny all responsability ;-p).
Of course, some safety measures may be sensible, but: isn't it true that you touch door handlers, phones, papers that other people have touched too? Have you heard of someone getting sick that way? Why is a hand scanner different?. Also I don't understand why "a bomb" is so dangerous... I'd always assume an sneeze would be way, way worse.
OTOH, if you want to be worried about those things, you can remember that a single bout of influenza can kill you (remember which was the most lethal pandemy in the XXth?)
*1: This is no medical advice. If you sneeze today and die of that, I
Why can't
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.
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?
But Momma said Cable management arms are the work of the devil
There fixed that for you :)
*could not help myself*
The spec is 4 times the cable radius. So about 1" Sorry but all those manufactures have more than 1" bend area in their cable management arms.