How to Remodel Your Data Center

I have tocome clean: I am a data center geek.

I love visiting them, and talking to thepeople who design and run them. Maybe it was because I worked around mainframesat the beginning of my IT career. Maybe it is all that power coursing throughall those wires, and those big, greasy generators. Or the thrill of gettingaccess to the inner sanctum of IT after passing through various securitycheckpoints and ‘man traps.’

There is just something about a hyper-cooledraised floor that gets me excited.Okay,enough of that. But there are some interesting things happening in datacenters, including companies that are trying to downsize them to save power andmoney.

Take a look at what Sun did last year, when they brought up a newdatacenter in Santa Clara that was about a third the sizeof the old one. Through various cash awards and utility rebates, they saved amillion bucks right off the bat, and that doesn’t take into account the monthlyoperating cost savings, which they estimate were about 60 percent of their oldelectric bills and will bring a three-year payback return on their investment.

And lestyou think this is just a one-shot deal, Sun’s goal is to have no datacenters bythe year 2015, at least according to this blog by Brian Cinque, Sun’s datacenter architect.

Now, anunkind response to this notion might be the reason they will have zero datacenters is because the company might be out of business by then, but let’s giveSun the benefit of the doubt and credit for their achievements, nonetheless.

So, howdid they do this? Several ways: server consolidation, server virtualization,replacing older units, and increasing rack densities.

Theystarted by grouping a bunch of racks, servers, and other equipment together inwhat they called pods that would be designed with the same requirements andcould easily be scaled up in the future.

Didn’t I say they weredownsizing? Yes, but they are doing so by cramming more gear into smallerspaces, and replacing older space-hogging hardware with newer gear that is morecompact. The racks in each pod were also designed to handle at least 5 kW now,and be scalable to 18 to 30 kW in the future to allow for even higher densitydeployments per rack.

The podsallow Sun to deploy modular solutions for cooling, cabling, monitoring, andpower, and to do so independent of the vendors needed for the gear in each pod.They took advantage of APC‘x Infrastructure line and Liebert XD equipment, and othervendors as well. You can see more explanations by Sun’s own staffers in a niceseries of videos.

Sun endedup tossing about 5,000 servers and switches as a result of the move. Well, theydidn’t actually toss all of this ? they tried to recycle as much as they could.But their approach is worth taking a closer look, especially if you are in themarket for a new data center, or want to start exploring ways that you can cutyour own costs and make your operations more efficient.

Next week, I will talk some more about what APC is doing to help data center consolidation anda visit to their data center test bed.