

How to Build a Modern Data Center - GregNess
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/data_centers/229402354

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phlux
> _"There will be more to come, but the art of data center design has finally
> gotten around to addressing its major sources of wasted power. "We may move
> one day from 1.07 to 1.06 or even 1.05," he said. But there will be no more
> announcements of 38% power savings in a new data center versus the one that
> came before it, he said. Today is the time for dramatic gains. Tomorrow's
> gains will come much harder."_

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The future measurement will no longer be PUE, but compute density in a given
square footage.

Especially when you have single service facilities like Facebook, and
standardized architecture offerings like Amazon.

However - what we _hopefully_ will see is "Designed for the compute cluster"
chassis offerings from the major vendors, based on the work of Google, and now
Facebook's open compute project.

The primary issues we have with DC design, and that are addressed by the open
compute model, is that you have all these various vendors; PDU, UPS, Power
Bus, Rack, Server, Cable Plant Components --- All these things "fit" together,
but they are not _DESIGNED_ together.

Meaning that they all get designed in a relative silo, though around standards
that make them connectable, but not to become something greater than the sum
of their parts.

Systems like hot aisle containment are still built effectively ad-hoc and
custom for each datacenter.

~~~
wmf
Density may increase TCO in many cases by making cooling less efficient, so
I'm not sure it's a good metric. (I worked on blade servers in 2001, but later
I came to the conclusion that the demand for extreme density around 2000-2002
was really just an attempt to scam colo providers, not a genuine advantage.)

I agree that the current choice between standard-but-inefficient and
efficient-but-nonstandard leaves room for new standards.

