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Generator Delays May Slow Data Center Projects
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Oct 25, 2006 12:00 PM
from the so-that's-why-mmos-can't-expand-to-meet-needs dept.
from the so-that's-why-mmos-can't-expand-to-meet-needs dept.
miller60 writes "The data center building boom is causing backlogs for new generator orders, with some companies reporting delivery delays of up to a year for new 2,000kw units, which are the current standard for mission-critical facilities. Generator availability is 'the No. 1 thing that will drive your construction schedules,' according to Equinix, which is building centers in three major markets. 'This will be a big issue for the next wave of data center builds,' says another industry executive. Used generators and smaller units tend to be more available than the 2 megawatt units, but companies targeting the enterprise sector may be wary of relaying on used units or smaller generators than those powering competing facilities."
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Technology: FCC Requires Backup Power For 210K Cell Towers 248 comments
1sockchuck alerts us to an article in Data Center Knowledge that explores ramifications from the FCC's decision a couple of months back to require backup power for cell sites and other parts of the telecom infrastructure. The new rule was prompted by wireless outages during Hurricane Katrina. There are more than 210,000 cell towers in the US, as well as 20,000 telecom central offices that will also need generators or batteries. Municipalities are bracing for disputes as carriers try to add generators or batteries to cell sites on rooftops or water towers. The rules will further boost demand in the market for generators, where there are already lengthy delivery backlogs for some models.
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2 MEGAwatts?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
HOLY MOLY, that's a lot of power! If you had 250 watt power supplies, all running at maximum, you'd be able to power 8,000 power supplies simultaneously! You could run a small town on a generator that large! Or to put it another way, you could use it to power a Diesel Locomotive capable of pulling dozens of fully loaded cars.
Wow, just wow. That's just an incredible amount of power to be putting in a datacenter. Is it even possible for these centers to run off the grid?
The part that I don't undestand is this: Why do they need just one generator? If you're having difficulties obtaining a 2Mw unit, wouldn't it make sense to get two smaller units? You'd waste a bit of extra space, but you'd have redundancy that a single genearator couldn't offer.
Re:2 MEGAwatts?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:2 MEGAwatts?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
Add to that the changes and parts necessary to change engines geared to creating propulsion to engines geared to creating electricity.
I doubt any company who considers their data center a key component of thier infrastructure to risk their backup solution on an untested refurbished generator.
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New or used, it doesn't matter. Your SUPPOSED to testing the generator at least once a week. Besides, it's not good to have aged fuel in the tank. You end up with all sorts of fuel-line and injector clogging due to the fact fuel will take on properties of varnish.
Point is, it does't matter if it's used. If it does the job and can be verified to do so o
Re:2 MEGAwatts?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
Plus, you'd have to deal with all the eels.
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If a new company were to come and attempt to meet the demand present they would be fighting for the same parts and resources that other more established companies are.
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So what you're saying is, the generator has to be able to power a small skyscraper in an emergency?
Small skyscraper (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I bet that in many situations, if you just pulled the plug on a 'center, very bad things might happen to the equipment, aside from th
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I've often wondered why they don't liquid cool these, or use ducted air cooling, then recover a portion of the waste energy. Any time you have a temperature difference you can get some returns. Considering these datacenters generate so much thermal energy, you'd think they would attempt to recover some rather than spend *more* energy to move it outside.
This is why certain engine testing facilities use their dynos to power portions of their facility - instead of burning fuel and paying for electricity, they
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Re:2 MEGAwatts?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
Your question on two generators vs. one: Redundancy does NOT come from two half sized units doing a single job, it comes from two FULL sized units each doing half the job. Having two half sized generator units means losing one will cause failure. With a 10,000HR MTBF per unit (rough number used for demonstration) you get a system MTBF of 5,000HR, NOT what I would call redundant! You would need at least 3/2 redundancy (3 generators doing the work of 2) to have a reasonably reliable replacement for a single large unit.
Parent
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Doubles the risk of a show-stopper failure in the backup system, yes. Twin engine aircraft are required to be able to fly with one engine out for this very reason. A crude way to visualize it is that the MTBF rates are like unto the chance of rolling a Critical Failure in [your favorite RPG]. One generator rolls the dice every (x) amount of time, and TWO generators is essentially rolling the dice
Re:2 MEGAwatts?!?! (Score:4, Funny)
I agree. And just imagine the publicity value of having two smaller 1337 kW genenartors powering up your data center in tandem.
Parent
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Keep reading the article--further down it says that large data centers (like MS and Google are building) need 20 or 30 2MW generators! My question: if you power requirements are that high, surely it must make sense to build your own powerplants? Multi-year construction time, I guess?
I know there are several 60-75MW units under const
After the next bubble crisis (Score:3, Funny)
Comming soon on eBay : 100MW generators
starting bid : 10$
condition : mint
reason : our startup went belly up.
When the next speculation bubble burst, there're sure going to be a lot of diesel mastodonts left every were...
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I used to work at a company who had a lot of equipment at an MCI enterprise-grade datacenter. I forget the exact terminology but they apparently have different classes of datacenters, and this was at the top of the line. It was phy
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Remember the old aeronautical engineering maxim of "twin engine planes have twice the rate of engine trouble as single engine planes". Point being, that sort of "redundancy" is only a net gain if you can actually "fly" with one of y
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2MW at 33KV is only 60 amps, a 33KV 60A line is hardly going to be a challange to construct.
so linking them to the grid really shouldn't be a problem.
you'd be insane to try and run a datacenter off generators all the time. Electricity from deisel generators costs several times what grid electric costs even if you pay consumer prices for grid electricity.
say 4 kilo
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That's still a good number of cabinets in a datacenter, but it's not the unbelievable size that seems to jump out at you when you think of
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Step 2: Multiple that price times 2,000.
So for California, 2,000kWh would cost $240 per hour to run. That's $5,760/day, $40,320/week, and a whopping $2,096,640/year!
Of course, for diesel your prices may be higher. As of right now, diesel is approximately $2.669 per gallon [doe.gov] in California. To compute the costs, you'd need to know how efficient the generator is. This page [uaf.edu] claims "approaching 40%", so we can use that for a guesstimate. At about 146,520,000 joules per gallon of
Hogwash (Score:3, Insightful)
Prior to working here, I was an engineer at one of the main datacenters for a big Texas based IT provider (think Ross Perot) and their datacenter had over 100,000 sq feet of raised floor. At last coun
Easy, just buy... (Score:5, Funny)
You may have to hire more people to start them, though. And change the oil.
Re:Easy, just buy... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
There is a stopgap measure for this (Score:5, Funny)
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I heard of a guy in L.A. doing the same thing with ferrets, but I for one don't think I could stand the smell. Plus, the little tube-rats tend to escape and crawl under the flooring to nest, and that just raises all kinds of fire hazard issues.
I can understand completely (Score:4, Informative)
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Now, with servers getting smaller (e.g., blades) and CPUs evolving to multi-core, heat and power usage density is increasing dramatically within the same floor space...and cooling it effectively ranges between difficult and nearly impossible...without ripping everything out and starting over
DC power? (Score:2)
I'd still keep a few generators in backup, but woulnd't you need less of them with DC?
Re:DC power? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Suggestion (Score:5, Funny)
not on my project (Score:4, Informative)
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What are the 4MW units if not diesel? If you're using Gas Turbines, that may explain why you didn't have the same supply problems.
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Generator Delays (Score:3, Interesting)
We only encountered a one month delay on delivery of our 125kW natural gas fired generator. Our delay was mostly because of hurricane Katrina having struck the gulf coast. We had to pull some serious string but since we wouldn't be moving in until November of 2005, it didn't really impact us.
alternate solution (Score:2)
Must remember to put rubber mats in all the entryways, of course.
Bonus benefit: no need for a security system. Just give the phone number of the county coroner to the janitor, so that if someone tries to break in overnight, the bodies will be cleaned up before anyone arrives for work in the morning.
Skywest Airlines can tell you... (Score:5, Interesting)
The end result is that all of their servers and network equipment went out for hours, and they had to cancel a whole lot of flights costing the company well over $1,000,000.
You can buy a lot of crappy gas generators at the Lowes across the street for $1M. I think I would have sent two guys there and two guys to the gas station to keep the essentials online.
There is a lot to be said for redundancy. Redundancy is very important. You can't talk about redundancy enough. Seriously, it's better to be twice as redundant than only half as redundant. And three times as redundant is even better than twice!
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Just as bad .... (Score:2)
What about the dams... (Score:2)
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I forget where I read it but I recall something about this being one of the key reasons Google was building a huge datacenter complex in Oregon on the Columbia river. Not only does it provide cheap electricity from hydro power dams but the river also provides cooling for the datacenter.
Clearing up a couple of misconceptions.... (Score:5, Informative)
There are many facilities out there with 10-30 2MW generators. I personally worked on a facility that had 18. 12 were for "critical load", that is, things fed via UPS's. This included all of the servers and networking equipment, the NOC, emergency lighting, fire supression systems and soforth. The other 6 were for "emergency load", these were things that did not need UPS protection (they could go down), just not for long. Virtually all of this load was air conditioning. So when the power went out the A/C's went off and came back 30-60 second later on generator, while the servers and all stayed up the same time.
While big, it's far from the largest facility out there.
Now, why would you buy one generator? Well, many buildings use bus variations (the whole N+1, or N+2 thing). So you build your data center for all 18 generators (as above), but install 6 and 3, or half the capacity. You now wait for the building to fill to 25-30%, and then start adding more generators, one at a time. However, they now have to be matched to the other generators.
Now, why are data center generators special? Well, to switch from one AC source to another the two loads must be approximately in phase (there is some tolerance, but it's small). So in order to be able to switch between generators, switch from UPS to generator, and all that other stuff you need additional circuitry to keep the generator just so. While the engine block and generator were the same as say a diesel locomotive, there were some additional sensors, lots of additional computer control, and some additional quick start features.
Most sites want their backup generators to be "ready to load" in 15-30 seconds. Indeed, several manufacturers make 10 second ready to load units. However that requires things like engine oil and coolant heaters that basically keep the entire motor warm 24x7x365. These are not found on industrial generators or locomotives.
So, they really are special, high tech tight tolerance units designed to work in a system. When you connect to WoW or your other large game you're probably one one of a thousand servers run by that company, who is one of but hundreds of companies in the larger colo facilities. It's not uncommon to find 50,000 servers under a single roof. So you need lots, and lots, of 2MW generators.
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this is what happens when they bring new powerplants on the grid.. for a short time there is some phase issues but within minutes the new plant will be in sync with the rest of the grid.. i assume this would apply to using these smaller sources
Well, yes and no (Score:4, Informative)
Your product is interesting but there is a difference. The reason the cost per KW of engines over about 500KW starts to rise is that they are designed for very long life. Unlike gas engines, where when you get outside the cylinder size range of about 50-500cc things start to go downhill, Diesels scale to enormous cylinder sizes but, because the mean piston speed needs to be constant, power goes up as the 2/3 root of cylinder volume. Mass scales more closely to volume, so mass rises faster than output. However, the benefit is that the wear life of a larger cylinder is much greater, because it can tolerate larger amounts of linear wear before blowby becomes excessive.
The implications are that while the cost per installed KW of your multi-engine plant is about the same as that of a single 2MW unit (because of the additional switching and control gear) it will not have the same service life and its lifetime cost per KW is higher.
Correctly and honestly, you describe your generators as backup. But larger units in the 2MW and over range can be used as primary generators. That's the difference. As somebody else has observed elsewhere, large units can be remote controlled by electricity utilities for handling load peaks. This means that their asset utilisation can be much higher than standby generators in well designed stationary applications. The lifetime cost per KWH of a backup generator can be very high because its first cost is amortised over low running hours.
Fact is, 2MW isn't a big Diesel. It's portable power (as used in trains and boats.) That's why supply and demand is likely to vary according to major events like earthquakes and wars.
Parent