Data Center Designers In High Demand 140
Hugh Pickens writes "For years, data center designers have toiled in obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems but now people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand. 'The data center energy problem is growing fast, and it has an economic importance that far outweighs the electricity use,' said Jonathan G. Koomey of Stanford University. 'So that explains why these data center people, who haven't gotten a lot of glory in their careers, are in the spotlight now.' The pace of the data center build-up is the result of the surging use of servers, which in the United States rose to 11.8 million in 2007, from 2.6 million a decade earlier. 'For years and years, the attitude was just buy it, install it and don't worry about it,' says Vernon Turner, an analyst for IDC. 'That led to all sorts of inefficiencies. Now, we're paying for that behavior.'" On a related note, an anonymous reader contributes this link to an interesting look at how a data center gets built.
Green IT (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OK - what do they do? (Score:5, Informative)
Those of you who have been in data centers have seen forced air cooling that is not used correctly; cabinets not over vent tiles, vent tiles in the middle of the floor, cabinets over air vent tiles but with a bottom in the cabinet so no air flows.
When equipment is nearing end of life and hardly being used, it sits there and turns electricity into heat while doing nothing. There are often a grand mix of cabinet types that do not all make best use of the cooling system, undersized cooling systems, very dense blade style cabinets replacing cabinets that were not so dense unbalances the heat/cooling process in the whole data center. Not to mention what doing so does to the backup power system when needed.
There are hundreds of 'mistakes' made in data centers all over the country. Correcting them and pushing the efficiency of the data center is a big job that not many people were interested in paying for in years gone by.
If you are interested in what you can do for your small data center, try looking at what APC does, or any cabinet manufacturer. They have lots of glossy marketing materials and websites and stuff. There is plenty of information available. Here's a first link for you http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/apc-index.html [datacenterknowledge.com]
Re:OK - what do they do? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:endanger the power grid? (Score:3, Informative)
We are building high power devices on a power grid that was designed 20 years ago before such concepts weren't even thought of.
Environmentalists won't let new plants be built. Solar, Wind are nt yet generating enough to even begin to offset the demand.
it isn't distribution it is availability. by 2015 I expect rolling blackouts during hot summers, simply to keep the air conditioners going.
Re:endanger the power grid? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I thought it would be higher (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's the NIMBYs. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OK - what do they do? (Score:3, Informative)