Concerned about the costs of datacenter power usage, cooling requirements and cabling? Dean Nelson has some answers for you and, as he says, "This is not rocket science." Nelson, director of Global Lab and Datacenter Design Services at Sun, shared his ideas on the subject with Al Riske. Nelson and his team have saved Sun millions and are now doing the same for customers.

Even though Sun's new server product lines are more compact and energy efficient than earlier products, high-density design simply makes them harder to cool. "You get more compute per watt but you also have more watts per rack," Nelson contends, "and those numbers are going to continue to increase. So we're actually building the products that cause an increase in heat. If we can't solve that in our own house, how can we expect our customers solve it?"

Forget the raised floor and forced air, he urges, because it just doesn't work for a 10 KW rack. At that rate of power consumption, forced air leaves hot spots everywhere.

While Nelson doesn't claim to have found a single answer to the problem of power/cooling/cabling, he maintains there is a single approach, and it is a modular approach centered on a building-block approach that Nelson and his team label a "pod." "In 3000 square feet, you have space for about six pods. A pod may have 20 racks," Nelson explains. "You have the ability to put a 2 kilowatt rack next to a 9 kilowatt rack, so as your hardware refresh program happens, your infrastructure stays the same. That includes power, cooling, and cabling."

Nelson recommends delivering power through an overhead busway system with modules that allow you to snap in the type of outlet you need. "Need to convert a regular 110 plug to an L630? No problem. Take out the 110 and snap in the L630," Nelson says.

Use intelligent in-row units for cooling. These can sense temperature changes and speed up or slow down as needed. Overhead fans can be installed to cool hot spots. "The overhead units save square footage but don't have intelligence. They're just on," he says. "But you are localizing the cooling so it's still very efficient."

When your racks reach the 20 KW per cabinet level, that's the time to begin considering liquid cooling, Nelson says, but not until. "Frankly, the majority of the datacenters don't need direct liquid yet.

With as many as 300 cables per 40-system rack (6000 cables in a 20-rack pod), users have a potential rat's nest on their hands. But Nelson has an answer here as well. "Instead of going up to a patch panel and all the way back to an MDF, or main distribution frame," he suggests, "the 6000 cables remain within the pod. We collapse them into an IDF, or intermediate distribution frame, and have just eight cables coming out of the pod."

Evidence of the success of this approach lies in Sun having constructed new energy-efficient datacenters in the United Kingdom, India, and the United States, where the company recently compressed 152 datacenters (202,000 square feet) at various California locations into 14 new centers (76,000 square feet) in Santa Clara. That translates into an 88 percent reduction in real estate -- and a 60 percent reduction in overall power consumption. Utility bills were cut by more than $860,000 in the first nine months of operation.

"Moreover, it reduced the new construction requirement by 20,000 square feet!" Nelson says. "That was a $9 million cost avoidance."

Riske writes that the new Santa Clara centers are delivering a 450 percent improvement in compute performance and a 244 percent increase in storage capacity. The hardware replacement portion of the project, which built on lessons learned in the UK and India, was completed in three months and is expected to pay for itself in just three years, he writes, adding that it will also reduce carbon emissions by 3,227 metric tons annually.

Nelson and his group have taken an innovative approach to datacenter construction, starting with the builders themselves, educating them to the requirements of a structure designed to accommodate a modular IT infrastructure.

"We've been working with the System Group on their next-generation products," Nelson reports. "They've reached a point where it's crossed that line. We can't just sell this incredibly powerful compute box anymore. It's so dense, so hot, that we have to guide the customer on how to design for it in their datacenter architecture. If we can go out to customers and say, 'Here's the product and here's how to design your datacenter to accommodate it' ... well, there you go!"

Read more about Nelson and his group's innovative approach to datacenter construction in Riske's Contrarian Minds article. [...read more...]

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