Making Data Centers More People-Friendly

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?"

100-degree hot aisles?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never had a temp problem in a data center. Noise? yes, hot? no.

Is this the future of data center design?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Not becoming the standard

[confused one]

This is a marketing ploy to attract customers to a new data center. Ultimately cost will determine the layout. If a cube is cheaper then cubes it will be. If 100 degree hot aisles saves money vs an 85 degree hot aisle, then they'll run them hotter.

Remote Management

[eln]

If you've got remote management set up properly, the only reason you ever even need to go to the data center is due to some kind of hardware failure. There's no sense paying the extra money a place like this will have to charge (to recoup the cost of all those extra amenities) for colo space if you only need to physically visit your servers maybe once or twice a year.

data center comfort

[NikeHerc]

The folks in India won't care how hot or cold it is in the data centers over here.

Re:Hand Scanners...

[X0563511]

Unless you've lived in a bubble your whole life, you're probably going to be OK...

Re:Where I worked

[Mr. Freeman]

"No emergency backup lights."
You're aware this is illegal, yes? "My boss is cheap and doesn't care" isn't an excuse. Call the fire marshal and tell them about it. They'll come down and write the owner up a ticket and force him to install the safety equipment.

Always surprises me the number of idiots that have the motivation and intelligence to bitch about the unsafe working conditions on the internet, but not to the fire marshal or OSHA.

I'm moving toward human-free data centers.....

[Desmoden]

It's not that I don't like humans, hell I married one. However humans are unpredictable. Applications want and need predictable hardware to live on. Even in a "CLOUD" with floating VMs that fly around like Unicorns you want stable predictable hardware underneath.

Humans trip on things, excrete fluids and gases, need oxygen, light, are temperature sensitive and depending on who's stats you believe cause up to 70% of outages.

I see convergence, virtualization etc as a chance to finally get humans OUT of the data center. Build it out, cable everything. Then seal it. Interaction does NOT require physical access. And a team of dedicated obsessive compulsive robots or humans can replace memory, drives etc.

Data Centers need to be human FREE zones. Not the common room in a dorm.