In-depth Foundation-Data Center Infrastructure Construction Analysis

The working principle of the bucket tells us that the amount of water in the bucket depends on the shortest length of the Board. Building Decoration, power supply and distribution, refrigeration, centralized monitoring, fire fighting, wiring, and other systems constitute a "barrel" of the data center infrastructure, the high availability of the overall life cycle of this wooden bucket) it doesn't depend on which part is outstanding, but on which part is the worst.

Bitter and sweet

Yuan · Wang Shifu "West Chamber": "If you are not really patient and sincere, how can you hook up this Lovesickness ." It is the end of a difficult day. In the construction of increasingly concerned data center infrastructure, we hope that the majority of users will also enjoy the benefits of "all-in-one.

The summer vacation is approaching, and the interruption of critical equipment, such as servers, caused by high temperatures in the hot summer of last year, is still vivid: Sina's letter of your post issued a warning, as Beijing continues to heat up, the temperature of the Netcom data center has reached ......; Beijing Netcom's ADSL equipment experienced a large-scale fault; Chongqing Telecom's server suddenly "paralyzed"; all of these are heat-induced disasters, which also led to a big discussion of data center construction. In the past, the design of heat insulation and ventilation was neglected in the construction of data centers, and a large amount of electricity was wasted.

Two years ago, the reporter visited the Institute of Eastern geophysical Corporation of China Petroleum Group. Many cabinets mounted with server and disk arrays were arranged in the data room, and the UPS providing power protection was equally conspicuous. There has not been any downtime caused by high temperatures, but when the reporter and the Deputy Chief Engineer of the hospital rely on energy to communicate with the data center for heat dissipation problems, it is precisely in foreign advanced machine rooms that the Cabinet "face-to-face, back-to-back" placement method is used instead of the "queue" placement method, which can be of great benefit to heat dissipation. Mr. Lai recognizes this "improvement ". However, it is not easy for a data center to be changed from a "queue-type" to "face-to-face" or "back-to-back", involving changes in cabling, floors, and other infrastructure, it is not easy to stop all servers and other devices. Fortunately, this "improvement" has been adopted in many new data centers.

Let's take a look at cabling and cabling, as the bottom-layer network transmission platform, also has a long life cycle. There is no mistake in selecting the appropriate model, as Hu hammer, Director of the information center of the Palace Museum, said, "If we had a richer capital, we would be more advanced in cabling, and later network upgrades would save a lot of trouble."

The data center construction of the above instances was completed several years ago. At that time, the user's understanding of the data center infrastructure was still lacking, the corresponding technologies, products, and concepts also limit users' thinking to a certain extent. However, in many recently-built data centers, users have learned the sweetness of attaching importance to infrastructure.

The Pingdingshan Coal Industry Group has just completed the construction of the data center. Director Zhang changsong of the group's computer communication center has advanced understanding of the infrastructure. "The construction of the data center is a pilot project, only when this project is completed in advance can a reliable basic physical environment be established, and all networks, computing, and storage devices have good installation and operation conditions." Therefore, the data center selects the inflytek Integrated System, including the input power distribution cabinet, 40 k n + 1 modular power supply, 22 cabinets, 2 precision air conditioners and inflytek manager, A complete data center architecture is formed. This is an outstanding data center that the reporter saw. It not only uses modular equipment, but also lays the foundation for later resizing and puts refrigeration and management in the same important position.

Of course, Pingdingshan Coal Industry Group provided a guarantee for the construction of infrastructure in terms of funds. For many users, Liao Yi, director of the network center of Hunan Institute of Engineering, is facing the following problems, but Liao Yi handled the problem well. During a visit to the data center of Hunan Engineering College, the reporter clearly felt that this was a data center built under the guidance of Advanced Concepts, focusing on infrastructure. In order to ensure the cleanliness and temperature of the data center, the specifications of the new data center have been improved. For example, the precision air-conditioning pipeline has been completed. due to insufficient funds, the data center has not been mounted; the cabling system selects 6 categories of Imax products for voice and video transmission. This also plays a role in investment protection and lifecycle extension. "Even in the future, if you need to upgrade again, the data center itself will not lag behind, so it is enough to push the core switch to the edge ." Said Liao Yi.

Best practices for complementing each other

"Mencius Teng wengong Shang": "Today, Teng has been a good country for fifty miles ." Learning from each other refers to learning from the same kind of things to make up for that shortcoming. In terms of data center infrastructure power supply and distribution, air conditioning fresh air, centralized monitoring, fire fighting, wiring, and many other aspects, the best way for users is to make up for the "short" aspect ", instead of simply adding "long" to the "long" aspect ".

Shen Weidong, vice chairman of the computer room equipment application branch of the China Computer User Association, said that the user gave the data room facilities the requirement of "on demand, challenges have been raised to the four phases of data center planning, design, equipment selection, operation and maintenance, as well as power supply, air conditioning, lightning protection, cabinets, monitoring, and other subsystems.

At present, for many users, the "Boards" of Refrigeration and Air adjustment are a little short, and the server downtime mentioned above is also caused by this. According to relevant data, nearly 33% of data centers in China experienced downtime due to air conditioning and cooling issues. In addition to the impact of cooling system problems on the overall availability of data centers, the problems of high power consumption have also plagued people. In addition to the necessary IT load, the power consumption of air conditioning and cooling equipment is the second place in the IDC.

"Traditional refrigeration systems are designed based on the old refrigeration technology of the past 20 or 30 years. They only consider the cooling capacity of air-conditioning hosts, rather than the cooling requirements of IT equipment inside the cabinets, the room temperature in the IDC room is often very low, but some cabinets have exceeded the normal working temperature of IT equipment. Even in the entire data room, this cooling solution does not take into account the hot and cold air channels, making the cold and hot air hybrid disorder, greatly reducing the cooling efficiency. In addition to reducing system availability, lowering cooling efficiency may also significantly increase operation costs ." Shen Weidong.

Generally, 42U cabinets only occupy 10 ~ 20 U? This is due to the limited heat dissipation and distribution capabilities of cabinets. Let's analyze the cause in detail.

The equipment in the Cabinet must be cold air with proper temperature and humidity and sufficient air volume ). These cold winds are sucked in by IT devices in the cabinet to reduce the temperature of components in the equipment, especially the CPU. When the number of devices in the cabinet reaches a certain level, the air volume of the cold air sent from the floor air outlet cannot meet the needs of all devices, thus forming a part of IT equipment with insufficient air and overheating. You can allocate the location of IT devices to solve the problem of local hot spots when the density of devices in the cabinet is expanded. For example, install the equipment with the largest heat load in the middle of the Cabinet to obtain the maximum air volume. In addition, a strong Horizontal Axial Exhaust Fan is installed in the upper or lower part of the Cabinet to enhance the suction capability of the upper or lower part to reduce the entry static pressure of the IT equipment. IT is worth noting that the top of early cabinets is usually equipped with a vertical axial, upward exhaust strong exhaust fan, but this fan has no effect on the current standard IT cabinet, because now all the rack-mounted IT devices are in the forward wind, rear air exhaust.

Proper cabinet layout is important to ensure proper temperature and sufficient air. The "face-to-face, back-to-back" Cabinet layout method is adopted. In this way, the cold air outlet is arranged in the middle of the two racks to form a cold air zone with a "Cold channel, the hot air formed by the cold air flowing through the equipment is discharged to the "hot channel" on the back of the two racks, and is returned to the air conditioning system through the air return ports arranged above the hot channel, this ensures smooth flow of air and energy in the entire data center, improves the utilization rate of precision air conditioners in the data center, and further improves the cooling effect.

At present, some manufacturers are also very concerned about this and have released related solutions. According to Yang Xiaoyi, marketing director of APC, APC has released a series of compatible module cooling solutions, including InfraStruXure InRow RC InRow cabinet cooling units), InfraStruXure Cooling Distribution UnitCDU, EF refrigeration Distribution Unit) and Rack Air Containment SystemRACS, fencing cabinet airflow solution ). These new refrigeration products are scalable, upgraded, and modular, providing predictable and accurate results. Compared with traditional cooling methods, it provides reliable, predictable, and sufficient cooling capabilities. These refrigeration products are part of the overall APC Data Center solution and are easy to install. By reducing the planning and establishment time of the data center, more benefits can be brought to users.

Zhu Liwei, Chief Engineer of the Information Room Design of Emerson Network Energy Co., Ltd., believes that the overall solution of power room integration provided by the company includes the IDC room climate adjustment solution section, to meet the refrigeration requirements of IDC equipment. DataMate 3000 series air conditioners are specialized air conditioners for small data centers, including 7 kW and 12 kW refrigerating capacity, and provide various configurations. DataMate mini Telecom precision Air Conditioners provide complete temperature and humidity control functions, designed to ensure the use of Precision Electronic Equipment in communication equipment rooms and computer rooms, the refrigerating capacity ranges from 4.9KW ~ 8.6KW; modular precision air conditioning system Challenger M + series, with a cooling capacity range of 20 kW ~ KW for a wide range of applications; Deluxe System luxury System precision Air Conditioners provide comprehensive environmental control for precision electronic equipment.

Koshida recently launched an integrated cabinet data center, which is the product of the concept of an integrated data center. Within a standard cabinet, integrated solutions include power input, smart distribution, environmental monitoring, temperature adjustment, and wiring management.

Do not ignore cabling

Yuan Kang Jinzhi's "Li xiaobeibeijing" has a discount: "Even if you can tell the shadows, Who are you waiting ?" The walking needles are arranged carefully. Users should also carefully consider the cabling of data centers. The ideal way is to add management functions.

Data center cables are divided into two categories: power cables, such as power supply cables for each device, and signal cables. Zhu Liwei said, "For power cables, detailed and accurate marking and labeling of the direction and direction of each cable are required. Signal cables include server peripheral cables, network cables, and optical fiber cables. The use of KVM or remote control systems can greatly save peripherals and cables. Network cables or optical fiber cables must be clearly labeled and bundled. In addition, sufficient information points must be planned during data center construction to avoid confusion caused by the continuous modification and increasing of cables in the future ."

The equipment in the Cabinet must supply power and communicate with the outside of the Cabinet. When the number of IT devices in the cabinet increases, these cables and connection terminals increase exponentially. To increase the number of power plug-ins, you need to consider whether the space should be left and whether the wiring position should be left on the power distribution cabinet. The wiring space in the Cabinet also needs to be considered in advance, because when the power density in the cabinet increases, the cable at the rear of the device will obviously increase wind resistance, therefore, cable management and cabling space must be considered.

The Harbin Commercial University was expanded and the data center was re-built. Mr. Sun Ming, deputy director of the university library, said, "they adopted the InfraStruXure infinitus system and used the cabling method. All the connections passed through the Cabinet from the top. In this way, you do not need to open the floor to find various connection lines as you did during mobile equipment or maintenance, reducing the fault points between critical loads such as servers and switches and the UPS, this improves the availability of the entire power system."

Xu xianghong, Technical Director of Imax China, said that the Alibaba IMAX iPatch real-time network infrastructure management system provides interactive real-time control over copper and optical fiber connections to the data center. The result is Faster network management response time and better security. The system provides automatic route management to help technicians complete work instructions correctly and provide services.

Chen Yutong, Chinese technical manager of Simon, believes that the daily management workload of the data center is the greatest, namely line maintenance and jumper management, incorrect document records do not reflect the actual situation of lines in the IDC, which is equivalent to false records. The latest intelligent management and wiring system (MapIT) launched by Simon integrates sensor technology and Ethernet technology on Simon's high-end wiring system to interact with the wiring system and its connected devices, to achieve automatic discovery and real-time monitoring of network port connections.

Xu Nan, Senior Technical Director of Tyco Electronics, elaborated on the problem from another perspective. Users usually need to maximize the network capacity within a limited space. Tyco Electronics Company launched copper MRJ21 high-density cabling system products, as well as fiber MPO high-density cabling system products, combined with the smart wiring Management System AMPTRAC, meets the special requirements of the data center and Storage Area Network.

Remote user management at your fingertips

"Post-HanShu · Yi Gong Chuan": "Those who are close to seeking for a long time are willing to work hard; those who are willing to seek for a long time are easy and have a final life ." Seeking for distance refers to turning away from the nearest place and pursuing the distance. For data centers, we really need a method of seeking far from each other, with remote management at our fingertips.

In today's Internet era, how to improve competitiveness and strengthen the construction and management of data centers is imminent. In the face of the constant expansion, relocation, alteration, and new construction of data centers, more and more users are reluctant to cope with the problem. Is there any way to make users feel comfortable in the face of ever-growing data centers?

Mr. Sun Ming, deputy director of the library of Harbin Commercial University, said: "network equipment and servers in the central data center are mounted in a rack. Generally, five servers are installed in each cabinet. Rack guide rails are provided when servers are purchased. displays, keyboards, display partitions, keyboard drawers, and 8-port display and keyboard sharing devices are configured for each cabinet ." Various functional modules and control modules in the system can be monitored through the internal LAN. The administrator can view the status of each module and Distribution Unit in the UPS system on the monitoring PC of the remote monitoring center, and can handle system problems and faults at any time. Mr. Sun has a deep understanding of Remote Management. "Our Library is located in the new campus of Jiangbei, and the data center management personnel are located in the south of the Yangtze River, which is far away. The remote management function is very helpful, the administrator can remotely monitor the status of the device in real time through Web, and manage the device at home."

Ms. Zhang Ting, director of the Chinese strategic partner of Avocent, said: "users need a management tool for each sub-item of the overall system, with different interfaces, accounts, and passwords, however, you need an integrated and unified management platform." Avocent's new-generation data center management solution: Remote and centralized server management, serial device management, power equipment management, and environmental monitoring through "Over IP, all IT resources of the IDC room are integrated into the unified system architecture. The powerful unified management interface enables efficient and centralized management of IT facilities in any location and any scattered IDC room.

Zhou Raritan technology manager in China believes that Raritan's "unmanned Data Center" solution enables managers to centrally manage equipment in the data center anytime and anywhere. Devices that can be managed by this solution include servers, switches, routers, UPS, and other devices based on serial port control across platforms, device management allows remote power switch management and BIOS-level management and maintenance.

Related link 1

· Instance analysis ·

To improve network performance, Jilin tietong decided to reorganize the existing information network system. in Jilin tietong's existing central machine room, power supply and distribution, precision air conditioners, lightning protection, environmental monitoring, and other equipment have been integrated and integrated, without re-integration. The power supply system and wiring project are the "Highlights" of this transformation ".

In the communication building, a large number of IT devices are distributed on different floors. The Central Data Center of the communication building originally uses a small-capacity inverter power supply, and the power supply system cannot meet the requirements of network communication operations. Therefore, the use of high-power UPS system has become a problem for Jilin tietong. In addition, another consideration when selecting UPS is to change the original distributed power management mode, the UPS system of the central data center on the first floor of the communication building will provide power assurance for all IT communication equipment and business systems from the first floor to the sixth floor, therefore, the cabling from the first floor to the sixth floor must be re-designed. The power frequency UPS system is applied to the Central Data Center of the provincial communication building, providing power assurance for all IT communication equipment and business systems from the first floor to the sixth floor, integrated UPS, cabling, network monitoring, and other overall solutions are formed.

Changing from Distributed Management to centralized management is not an easy task. The complex cabling of communication buildings must be solved first. If a line is directly added on the basis of the original wiring, it will only make management more difficult, and it will be a huge project for system maintenance and future expansion, to fundamentally solve the problem, only re-design the route. During the implementation of the scheme, all lines from the first floor to the sixth floor were adjusted, and the AC Power Distribution Cabinet was reconfigured. The AC input and output lines on each floor were arranged in separate channels, thus laying the foundation for centralized management. The solution also configures KELONG UNMS-1 Network Intelligent Management System, through UPS RS-232, RS-485 communication interface and external configuration software, can conveniently realize UPS short-range and remote intelligent monitoring.

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Editing and editing ideas

Leave room

The data center can be simply considered to be composed of two layers: The IT layer and the data center facilities layer. According to the current situation in China, the construction of data center facilities involves both one-step deployment and one-step upgrade. Many users prefer the latter. This involves the expansion problem, so we need to "leave room" for future expansion ".

In the planning stage, we must first consider the scalability requirements on the IDC site selection, including requirements for area, floor location, floor height, and ground load. If you decide to use a single room, IT is clear that you need to consider the area requirements of IT equipment and equipment in the data center during future expansion. If you want to use another room during expansion, You need to evaluate the structure of the room you want to use at the same time.

Shen Weidong said that the vertical distance between the air-conditioning outdoor unit and the data center should not exceed 15 meters. Therefore, the data center's site selection floors should be located on floors that are closer to the roof, bottom layer, or equipment layer, sufficient space is reserved for the installation of external air conditioners when the air-conditioning system of the data center is expanded in the future. If you want to increase the device density in the data center during future expansion, you must consider the future device weight and the load-bearing capacity of the data center floor.

For general large-scale data centers, the requirements for Power Transformer expansion are not considered, but the capacity of power supply lines in the data centers must be considered. Because the expansion and transformation of power supply lines is complicated, we recommend that you reserve the capacity that can meet the needs of future equipment expansion during the initial construction of the data center. Pay special attention to the load of air conditioners and other equipment.