Making Data Centers More People-Friendly 137
1sockchuck writes "Data centers are designed to house servers, not people. This has often meant trade-offs for data center staffers, who brave 100-degree hot aisles and perform their work at laptop carts. But some data center developers are rethinking this approach and designing people-friendly data centers with Class-A offices and amenities for staff and visitors. Is this the future of data center design?"
Re:First troll! (Score:4, Informative)
100 degree hot isles are too cold. Hot isles should be the temperature near the maximum component tolerance of the parts in the server. If a part has a maximum temperature of 150 degrees, and runs happily at 120 degrees, the hot isle should be 120 degrees. This way the cooling efficiency is the highest.
See Google and SGI (Rackable) container designs.
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/04/the-beast-unveiled-inside-a-google-server.ars [arstechnica.com]
As you can see from the photo there, all the cables in the front. No need to get behind it where the hot isle is.
Centers have had tech-friendly amenities for years (Score:4, Informative)
I've been renting facility space in a number of data centers over the last fifteen years, including Exodus (remember them?), IBM and Equinix. In particular Equinix facilities have always provided meeting rooms, work areas, (seriously locked-down) access terminals, great bathrooms and showers for visiting techs for at least 5-7 years. OK, the actual cage areas are pretty cold, but that's the nature of the beast -- I wouldn't want my equipment to overheat. Equinix also has tools you can checkout if you forgot yours or were missing something critical, and racks of screws, bolts, optical wipes, common cable adapters, blue Cisco terminal cables... just in case. (Other than paying them for service, not affiliated with or owning stock in Equinix. But perhaps I should have.)
I would always look forward to the free machine hot-chocolate when visiting for work assignments.