Gartner on Extreme Data Centers

December 14, 2010

One of the best sessions I went to at the Gartner Data Center conference last week, was entitled Extreme Data Centers – Attaining Massive scalability – in the minimum space at the lowest cost.

The talk was given by David Cappuccio who is a managing vice president and chief of research for the Infrastructure teams with Gartner, responsible for research in data center futures, servers, power/cooling, green IT, enterprise management and IT operations.

Dell's Modular Data center, mentioned in David's talk, a few days before it went live at Tier 5 in Australia.

Here are my notes from the talk:

The Extreme Data Center definition

  • Designed for efficiency first
  • Designed for optimal performance per kilowatt and or per square foot
  • They leverage new design principles to attain the biggest benefit

An example he then gave was supporting 2,107 servers, 18,300 images and 19 petabytes of storage in 2,600 sq. feet of IT space

New data centers are designed around efficiency

  • In power utilization
  • In space allocation
  • In capital expenditures

Three ways to solve your problem

  • Build your own datacenter from the ground up — greatest control but most expensive
  • Retrofit what you have to extend its life – greatest potential risk but least expensive
  • Use modular ideas to build and expand later
    • Reduce capital upfront costs
    • Simple growth when needed
    • Can use existing land or building

Emerging Design trends

  • Build small, build often
  • Build for density
  • Scale vertically and then horizontally
  • Build and rebuild pods (or sections of your data center)
  • Build density zones (group your systems by how dense they are – high, medium or low– and then match the power and cooling at the zone level.  Density is usually based on the workload mix)
  • Consider multi tiered designs (all apps aren’t created equal)
  • Use free air and reuse heat
  • Design for the unknown

Modular Designs for sustained growth/The evolution of pre-built solutions

  • David felt this approach was a really good idea and made sense
  • He felt the drawback was that there weren’t any reference accounts: he mentioned HP at Purdue and “some company down in Australia” (which dear readers is the Dell MDC down at Tier5, pictured above).
  • He cited Azure as the poster child for containers
  • Besides citing Sun’s “Black Box” as the granddaddy of all these, the pre-built solutions he mentioned were:
    • HP Flexible data center
    • IBM scalable modular datacenter
    • I/O anywhere
    • Dell Modular Data center

Energy consumption and efficiency

  • PUE, DCiE are defacto standards – use them
  • But PUE is not the goal – it’s the beginning
  • PPE: performance and capacity per kilowatt are key

Three examples of some cool new designs

  • Yahoo Computing coop: outside air cooled, minimal fans no chillers and a PUE of 1.08
  • Microsoft containers:  8×40 feet versions, 8-12 weeks for delivery, 2K servers per container
  • Net App: Slab-based w/overhead air design: first energy star rated data center, 25 megawatts

Stay tuned for more

The extreme data center space is an “extremely” hot one.  Watch this space to learn more about how Dell plays here going forward. 🙂

Pau for now…

Extra-credit reading:

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Posted by Barton George

Tier5 first to fire up Dell’s 3rd-gen Modular Data Center

November 14, 2010

Last week, Tier5 who has taken over an old Mitsubishi facility in Adelaide was the first company globally to deploy Dell’s third generation Modular Data Center.  Tier5 is an eight-person start up that is turning the former auto plant into a state-of-the-art data center park to be leased by wholesale tenants including managed service providers, resellers and large users.

Instead of building out a traditional data center Tier5 went with Dell’s Modular Data Center (MDC) which snaps together like ginormous Legos allowing systems to be up and running in as little as a week.  The MDC’s modular nature also allows capacity to be added incrementally as needed.

For a great overview, check out the short video that ITNews did at the opening press conference on Tuesday.

Hand-in-hand

To get Tier5 exactly what they wanted Dell’s DCS team worked collaboratively with the Tier5 engineers over a period of nine to 10 months to nail down the exact specs.  As Tier5 founder Marty Gauvin said, “Our engagement with Dell DCS was enormously collaborative.  We were able to achieve our objectives in a very collaborative way, and then go beyond them.”

So what is this thing?

The shell of Dell’s MDC solution is formed by a steel frame, rather than a standard rigid shipping container. As a result of this design, Dell can deploy modules with different configurations to meet the needs of different customers.  Each module houses up to 12 standard server racks and up to 2,500 servers. The design gives Tier5 the flexibility to mix and match hardware components within a module to better serve the specific needs of its customers.

The MDC solution contains two rows of custom-built racks with a center hot aisle, a design that allows  easy access to components for servicing and maintenance. The module offers an easily accessible connection point for power and cooling as well as IT management. It also offers multiple cooling options, including chilled water, evaporative cooling and outside air. This enables users to choose the cooling option that works best for the site and the climate.

Keepin’ it green

Besides allowing Tier5 to be agile and not having to tie up capital until right before its needed, the MDC also saves on a tremendous amount of power.  Tier5 estimates a best in class power usage efficiency (PUE) of 1.18 for the Adelaide modular data center.   This in turn will result in their customers saving approximately AUD $8 million in power costs per year.

Where to next?

So the first third-generation Dell MDC has surfaced down under.  Stay tuned to see where in the world the next one will pop up. 🙂

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George