Cloud computing Age: Ways to make data centers smarter

As the data center of the modern world, how can we operate economically, efficiently and environmentally? Maybe you can find the answer at IBM's Raleigh Data Center.

The North Carolina State of the three cities of Raleigh, Duran and Chapel has a beautiful, large forest, dotted with large and small lakes. Duke University, North Carolina State University and the University of Northern Carolina have provided sufficient research and development talent for this Triangle Park Enterprise, founded in 1959 the park has more than 170 world-class enterprises to settle in, IBM is one of the enterprises, where there are 3,800 employees, covers an area of 765 hectares. The 360 million-dollar "leadership" data center is located in the Raleigh Park.

In 1997, IBM had 235 data centers around the world, and now it has shrunk to just 12, a total of $4.1 billion trillion in cost reduction. and Raleigh's global data center in IBM has a benchmark. According to IBM's common vocabulary is "wisdom", in the end how wise? How can you be so wise? Let's go into the data center, located in Raleigh, and look for the true meaning.

Modular design

IBM's Raleigh Data Center was built in 2008, using an abandoned factory building in the area. The 10,000-square-foot data center effectively utilizes 95% of the original building's material and begins to support customer operations within 15 months. IBM has built up a lot of experience in the past 3 years by designing 500 modular data centers, according to Steve Sams, the IBM Global Information Technology Services data center and Vice President of Intelligent Integrated service. "A data center will have to invest millions of or even tens of millions of of dollars and it needs to last for about 30 years, but it technology or computing models are changing every years, what kind of method can maintain the vitality of the data center, but also can cope with the pressure of data explosion?" "The answer given by Sams is modular design, which is the key to ensuring that data centers are" on demand ".

According to Philip Calabrese, director of Engineering and Construction services, the 10,000-square-foot Raleigh data Center has built 6000 square feet and the remaining 4000 sq ft can be quickly deployed to the user's needs. He argues that the goal of modular design is to scale the size of the data center, not just the number of servers, but also UPS capacity, chillers and even the number of electrical switchgear. Generally speaking, the data center cost 60% is the mechanical and the electric system, the late operating cost is the prophase cost 3~5 times. Modular design can effectively reduce the upfront cost of data center investment and delay the cost of 40%~50% data center life cycle. According to IBM's research, in the early days of data center construction, the ability to increase 5%~10% investment to meet the potential challenges of the future, can support the future 3~5 times of computing demand growth. In the long run, it's a pretty good investment plan,

On the surface, such planning and design ideas do not have any unexpected place, but how to consider in various details, for the future development of a convenient expansion of the foundation, which requires long-term experience accumulated. Many people tend to simply assume that the data center is a large house that hosts many servers. In fact, to ensure that the computing resources can be "on demand", to ensure that sufficient energy conservation, to ensure the continued stability of business operations, and so on, this requires data center contractor has enough experience. In people's minds, IBM is a provider of computer services, the engineers are certainly computer professionals, but the company also has a lot of building engineering experts, especially in intelligent buildings, they have a long time research and engineering capabilities.

Jim Fletcher is IBM's chief architect, and in his view, the data center as an intelligent building must meet these conditions: continuously monitor energy and heat dissipation, optimize the efficiency of resource utilization in the data center, respond to and adjust the data center's situation in real time, provide historical and real-time data analysis, Enhance the lifecycle of various assets, and so on.

The data center of Raleigh is no doubt such an intelligent building, there are more than 8,000 branch circuit monitoring points to automatically monitor IT system operation, using more than 2000 sensors to collect room air-conditioning problems, but also installed more than 30,000 infrastructure and environmental sensors. With the data provided by these monitoring devices and sensors, managers can see the temperature, humidity, and even some areas of the machine running on the data center display. Using this data for simulation analysis, you can also determine the best way to deploy the server.

How important energy saving is

Data centers are large consumers of energy, and some people count that 12% of global energy consumption will come from data centers by 2020.

There are already companies that provide part of the power by placing solar panels on the roofs of data centers or by wind power. For example, ebay has 100-kilowatt solar panels installed in the Denver data center. The battery board is deployed in a 21,000-square-foot roof of the data center, which occupies about 18,000 square feet. Peak summer consumption This system can produce up to 500-kilowatt kwh per month. The supply of power to the office area of the data center accounts for only about half of its output.

The Environmental Protection Agency of the United States has a power Usage effectiveness (PUE) Rating program, can be simply understood as "annual Energy Star" ratings, from 1 to 100 points, the higher the score the better. To win the title of Energy Star, the data center scored more than 75 points, while the Raleigh data center scored more than 90 points. Why is there such a good energy-saving effect? This will also take a look at IBM's management of the data center.

Data center power consumption is mainly concentrated in three parts: IT equipment, cooling and other. "To build a truly green data center, there must be a complete solution." Philip introduced the IBM Green Data Center 5 steps: First, to assess the existing facilities (energy assessment, virtual three-dimensional power management and thermal analysis), followed by the planning and construction of energy efficient data centers, the third is the IT infrastructure and specialized use of the processor virtualization, The forth is to realize energy control through power management software, and the other is to adopt more effective measures than traditional air-conditioning refrigeration.

In Philip's view, many data centers have significant hotspot areas, mainly because of server rack layout errors, unreasonable design in the engine room and the unnecessary mixing of hot cold air. The cool blue Energy-saving technology solution for Tivoli management software is one of Raleigh's best practices. The software can monitor electricity consumption, customers can make electricity policy, tracking electricity situation. By monitoring current power consumption, users can find opportunities and ways to conserve electricity.

In many cases, the design of the server itself is also an important aspect of energy conservation. For example, its water-cooled cabinet rear door design, the rear door heat exchanger can absorb the heat from the back end of the rack. Sometimes, energy saving comes from unexpected changes. For example, IBM academician, chief engineer Roger Schmidt is the inventor of the patent of "Heat exchanger-rear Door (Back heat exchange)". This patented technology, it seems, is simply not "High-tech"-by changing the way the cabinet is placed, it can reduce the overall temperature to around 26.25 degrees Celsius, while the average cabinet temperature is about 37.5 degrees Celsius.

The back is the highest cooling temperature of the cabinet, cabinet back-to-back, you can concentrate hot air in the middle, through the ventilation pipe will be hot air pumping, the cabinet equipped with water-cooled devices to release the front of the air-conditioning, so that can be cold and hot air isolation and circulation exchange, can quickly reduce the heat emitted from the back of the cabinet. In the Raleigh data center, the cabinet is all back-to-back, only this technology can reduce the cabinet temperature by about 10 degrees Celsius. It may not be very high-tech, but to do this, you really need to have a wealth of data center operations management experience.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)