Addressing eBay’s Project Mercury needs with Dell’s Modular Data Center

April 17, 2012

Back on December12, eBay held their grand opening for their Project Mercury data center in Scottsdale, Arizona.  In attendance were all the partners that contributed along with members of the Data Center Pulse group.  Although the event itself wasn’t secret, the details were held in check until a couple of weeks ago when Derrick Harris posted his article in GigaOm

Some of the details published were the actual PUE numbers around Dell’s Modular Data Center:

Project Mercury gets free cooling year round, even in the heat of summer. On Aug. 23, 2011 — a 119-degree day — one of eBay’s Dell units had a partial-PUE score 0f 1.044 while drawing 520 kilowatts of power. On January 17, 2012, while drawing 1 megawatt, the same unit had consistent partial PUE of 1.018 while the rest of the data center was doing between 1.26 and 1.35.

And the winner is

Today the Uptime Institute announced that this Modular Data Center Product Deployment by eBay and Dell were named recipients of the 2012 Green Enterprise IT Award.

Here is a video I did at the opening back in December with Dell’s GM for our Data Center Solutions group, Roy Guillen.  Roy talks about what eBay was looking for and how we answered the challenge.

Some of the ground Roy covers:

  • The challenge that eBay issued
  • How Dell got involved
  • The evolution of Dell’s Modular Data Center and what eBay proved about the ability to group a whole bunch of workloads that don’t require tier 4 resiliency

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Welcome to the Wild and Wacky World of Data Centers

December 8, 2010

I got back last night from the Gartner Data Center conference in Las Vegas which runs through the end of this week.  Although one of the biggest topics of conversation was cloud computing, I was most interested in learning about what’s happening more generally in the world of data centers.  I’m pretty up to speed on the cloud yet the intricacies of the data center are still new to me.

A couple of great presentations

There was a great presentation yesterday morning from Ebay’s VP of technical operations, Mazen  Rawashdeh, talking about their “Northstar” project and how they have completely  redesigned their data center strategy to support the business (I hope to do a short post on that soon).   The other presentation that I found very educational was “Extreme Data Centers – Attaining Massive scalability” by Gartner’s David Cappuccio (something else I hope to do a post about).

Learning from those in the know

The other way I got up to speed about the wild world of data centers is by talking with a couple of the folks who cover the field.  The first person I met with was Rich Miller, founder of Data Center Knowledge.  Here is what Rich had to say:

Some of the ground Rich covers:

  • How the interest in data centers seems to grow every year
  • What are the current hot topics that he see’s
    • Energy and efficiency
    • Data center design and thinking outside the box
    • Some of the funkier designs people are coming up with

If you’re interested in data centers, stay tuned for a few more entries based on the Gartner Data Center conference.

Pau for now…

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George