Archive for the ‘Data Center Cooling’ Category
Are power and cooling limiting your data center?
I just read a great whitepaper by Eaton, the power products manufacturer, called “Is power your weakest link in data center flexibility?” The whitepaper talks about how higher densities and larger power footprints are causing companies to outgrow their data center power. Power is a limiting factor in data center growth.
Cooling is close behind, because for every 1 kW of power required to run IT equipment, about 1 kW of cooling is required to remove the heat.
Eaton’s modular power is a sensible approach to building an incremental power infrastructure in-house.
Colocation is a sensible alternative to eliminate the power and cooling problems. But all wholesale colocation providers are not created equal. The provider will need to allow room for growth, and provide usage based power billing. This approach providers for more granular, incremental growth in the costs of operating data center floor space, power and cooling.
The illusion of data center uptime
Most of the mid-size companies that visit our Midwest colocation facility already have a data center. It’s the one in their home office. These companies have built a data center inside the four walls to take advantage of real estate that is already leased, along with cheap, fast network access for all of the employees in the building.
Redundant generators protect against data center downtime
Some companies value data center uptime more than others. These companies are in markets where their computer downtime can cost them sales, profits and clients. These companies often have in-house data centers with more sophisticated equipment to keep the computer systems up and running in the event of a power outage. These companies invest tens of thousands of capital dollars in battery backup, power conditioning and generators to protect from downtime. A few even spend thousands more in capital dollars to makes the air conditioning more reliable.
But do all these data center capital costs improve uptime? The answer is yes, but in many cases, not enough. Many of us mistakenly look at the last five years of actual downtime to judge whether our data center is highly reliable. This is a mistake. Your data center may not be reliable, even though you’ve been lucky for the last five years.
What does it take to keep your downtime to less that an hour per year? It takes data center with two of everything that is critical for operation: power, cooling, and communications systems. This two of everything model is also called N+N data center redundancy. Without it, companies should expect hours or days of downtime per year.
Uptime Institute uses a structured system to classify data centers. Tier IV data centers are built with N+N redundancy (two of everything) to maximize reliability. These Tier IV data centers are designed to deliver 99.995% uptime, which is 28 minutes of downtime per year or less. But building a Tier IV data center is expensive. A second power feed into a building can cost a quarter of a million dollars. CFOs routinely reject the idea a second generator because of the exorbitant capital costs. Without N+N data center redundancy, the uptime numbers just don’t add up.
What’s the answer to high uptime and manageable costs? Many companies use affordable wholesale colocation facilities. Some of these outsource data centers offer 99.995% uptime in exchange for monthly operating expenses rather than exorbitant capital costs. Many IT staffers use colocation to reduce their workload, get out of the power and cooling business, and focusing their data center management on their critical computer systems.
Colocation is not for every company. Applications, users, geography and other factors play into whether colocation or cloud computing might improve the reliability of your data center. The bottom line is the cost of downtime to your company. If you need 99.995% uptime, don’t fall prey to the illusion of data center uptime. Consider wholesale colocation to solve the uptime problem and manage data center costs.
Does wholesale colocation simplify data center management? Does outsourcing the facilities side of your data center make it easier to manage the data center?
Consider the what it takes for 99.995% uptime enterprise data center facilities management:
F5 tornado resistant data center building- for Midwest colocation
Full data center power redundancy – multiple power feeds, generators, UPS systems and rack feeds
Data center cooling redundancy – multiple, concurrently maintainable cooling systems
Physical security – two factor authentication and multiple layers of loggable physical security
Fire suppression – Reliable, industry standard systems with regular testing and maintenance
Data center compliance and certifications – from SAS 70 to SSAE 16, HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, FDA, FISMA and NIST certifications are just a few of the standards
Telecomm redundancy – Multiple telecommuncations feeds with separate entrances into the building
These requirements have nothing to do with Information Technology. They are facilities problems. If a colocation provider can take these requirements off your hands, you’re free to focus on data center management of your business, the applications that support it, and your underlying IT infrastructure.
Yes, wholesale colocation providers can simplify data center management. And if you’re selective, you can use the colocation provider to engineer higher data center uptime levels. Look for a wholesale colocation provider that delivers hardened data centers, N+N data center redundancy, multiple carriers, no cross connect fees, and 99.995% uptime. Power billing based on utilization is key. And don’t forget to shop for low data center power costs.
Wholesale colocation lets you stop worrying about data center facilities management.
The tunnels linking data halls in the Green Mountain Data Center in Norway, which will use cool water from a nearby fjord to support its cooling system.
A small but growing number of data centers are slashing their cooling costs by using the environment as their chiller, tapping nearby rivers, underground lakes, wells and even the Baltic Sea. A new project in Norway plans to draw cold water from an adjacent fjord and use it to cool data halls.
The Green Mountain Data Center is located on the shores of the island of Rennesoy, inside concrete buildings within caves carved out of the mountain. Racks of servers will now fill underground halls that once stored ammunition for NATO.
More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller
You don’t need to go very far in IT nowadays to find people who are diligently working to do more with less, even as they’re working to transform and modernize their environments.
One way to keep the interest high — and those operating and investment budgets in place — is to show fast results, and then use that to prime the pump for even more improvement — and even more funding — with perhaps even growing budgets.
The latest BriefingsDirect discussion then explores how to build quick data center project wins, by leveraging project tracking and scorecards, as well as by developing a common roadmap for both facilities and IT infrastructure.
We’ll hear from a panel of HP experts on some of their most effective methods for fostering consolidation and standardization across critical IT tasks and management. This is the second in a series of podcast on data center transformation (DCT) best practices and is presented in conjunction with a complementary video series.
More of the SOA World article from Dana Gardner
Should your outsourced data center (colocation) provider also be your IT services provider?
Your purchasing department would probably say yes. Your legal department might too. One throat to choke. They’re looking at the problem from a vendor management perspective, and fewer vendors is better. Or is it?
Ask yourself these questions:
What if you love the data center facility but the quality of the IT services offered are marginal?
What if you already have vendors for specific IT services?
What if you prefer to choose best of breed vendors for specific projects and technical support?
What if your staff does most of the IT work?
Would it be more sensible to separate the choice of data center provider from the choice of IT services provider?
Most companies that choose wholesale data centers over self-built data centers make the decision based on the uptime they get per dollar spent. That’s because these pure data centers, also known as wholesale colocation, concentrate on one thing: mission critical facilities. 99.995% uptime requires incredible attention to detail with hardened data center buildings, redundant power, cooling, telecom access, and data center regulatory compliance. But not all colocation providers are alike; data center reliability varies greatly based on the companies power, cooling, telecom systems, and compliance. If data center uptime is important, then the sensible approach would be to pick the best-designed facility for your needs.
Does it make sense to reject the best-fit data center facilities provider because they don’t do router work, or AS/400 support, or eCommerce platform support? The answer could be yes. It depends on your organization’s applications and your own staff’s talent in supporting these business-specific applications and their platforms. When considering full-service providers, make sure that you understand the quality of the data center behind the provider’s services. You have the option to pick your own wholesale colocation facility and require your vendors to support the hardware in your colocation space.
If you’re purchasing rack space from a full-service provider, you may be paying too much for your colocation space. Especially if your provider maintains a large staff of IT Support Engineers. Bench time is expensive, and unless these Engineers are fully utilized, your rack space pays for part of the Engineers’ wages. Make sure you consider competitive pricing from other colocation facilities. Data center pricing models are excellent indicators of what vendors value and how they handle their overhead.
Your outsource data center provider does not have to be your IT services provider. You have options. You can choose the best among data center vendors with a little homework.
Do your worst-behaved applications define your data center requirements?
In Part 1, I talked about the most important applications in your business, also know as your mission critical applications. I covered reasons that many of these mission critical applications are ill-behaved and require special care and feeding in your enterprise data center. These reasons include high bandwidth requirements on the headquarters or wide area network, expensive overbuilt servers, and additional hours of maintenance overhead per month.
How do these worst-behaved applications affect your data center requirements?
Bandwidth – Many applications generate large amounts of network traffic for even the smallest user activity. These levels of traffic can cause the applications to perform poorly via the Internet or small remote office connections. These apps can influence your decision on the location of the primary data center. It often seems simplest to place the data center close (in the same building) to your highest number of users. Yet an in-house data center may not fully support your data center uptime requirements.
Interoperability – If your most important applications link up to other important applications, you may be forced to put these applications in the same data center. If your manufacturing system is feeding data to your customer management system and your accounting system, reliability becomes more important, because a small amount downtime can affect three important software systems, not just one.
Souped-up, expensive servers – Experience has taught your IT staff to overbuild server and storage hardware to solve some of the bad behaviors of your mission critical applications. These non-standard configurations can drive up costs. Non-standard configurations are also more difficult to operate in cloud computing environments, forcing the data center to remain physical, instead of virtual.
More Maintenance – More problems mean more maintenance work to solve them. This drives up FTE requirements and makes outsourcing more complex and expensive. Maintenance load can influence location and staff requirements for the data center.
Costly uptime – Problem applications are harder to keep running and often require more technology for high uptime levels. Expensive high uptime technologies like clustering greatly drive up the costs of keeping the application alive and well.
Ill-behaved line-of-business applications influence strategic data center decisions:
Primary data center location – Would your data center be better off in-house, in the cloud, in an outsourced data center facility or a hybrid of all three?
Wide area network design – Where is the hub of the network? How many telecom providers should I use? How much bandwidth do I buy? How can I get the best pricing?
Server hardware ownership and maintenance – Do I buy my own servers for maximum control? Do I use virtual servers in the cloud? Do I use a combination of both?
Maintenance – Does in-house staff do maintenance or do I outsource it?
Good CIO strategy includes a clear understanding of the mission critical applications and their data center requirements.
More CIOs are using these tools to mitigate the risks of their worst-behaved applications:
- Thin application delivery via software by VMware and Citrix to solve bandwidth problems
- Affordable colocation to build in 99.995% uptime on the data center power and cooling
- Cloud computing services like virtual private servers for predictable mission critical applications
- Change management discipline to manage application behaviors and reduce maintenance
Don’t let your worst-behaved applications cause you to make bad decisions about your data center.
A Trinity Health IT engineer keeps systems that reside in a generator shed running, despite fluctuating temperatures and dusty conditions.
Since January, David Filas, a data center engineer at Trinity Health, has been running decommissioned servers, networking gear and storage systems in a simple generator shed on the grounds of the healthcare provider’s headquarters in Novi, Mich.
Filas hopes that by January 2012, this project will have convinced his colleagues that IT equipment isn’t as fragile as they think it is .
So far, the equipment has stayed up and running, enduring Michigan’s wide seasonal variations in temperature and humidity levels, Filas said at the Afcom data center conference in Orlando last month.
More of the Network World article from Patrick Thibodeau
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the 1,200-square-foot data center at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering — that means the facility has been operating three years longer than CIO and vice president of operations Joanne Kossuth had originally planned. Now, even though the school needs a facility with more capacity and better connectivity, Kossuth has been forced to back-burner the issue because of the iffy economic times.
“Demand has certainly increased over the years, pushing the data center to its limits, but the recession has tabled revamp discussions,” she says.
Like many of her peers, including leaders at Citigroup and Marriott International, Kossuth has had to get creative to eke more out of servers, storage and the facility itself. To do so, she’s had to re-examine the life cycle of data and applications, storage array layouts, rack architectures, server utilization, orphaned devices and more.
More of the Computerworld article from Sandra Gittlen
Data Center Knowledge recently conducted its 2011 survey of enterprise class data center operators and found that data center design is still the top area of interest. The survey has be conducted in each of the last four years, and in 2010 data center design moved to the top of the list and remains a key topic of interest for 2011.
Having the proper design infrastructure eases the challenges associated with operations and scalability. Data center operators are charged with simultaneously saving money and making their facilities more sustainable to comply with corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies. Design is the key tool that can incorporate both objectives and deliver results.
Power and cooling has moved up the list from number three to the second position on the list. Power is often the number one cost to operate the data center so it’s no surprise this is an area of strong interest. Cooling projects are often the easiest way for data center operators to realize short-term savings in optimizing their data centers, so decision makers are keenly focused on identifying the best cooling solutions.
More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Kevin Normandeau
