Making the Web More Efficient, a Thousand Servers at a Time
I’ve spent way too much of my life in data centers, listening to that hum, smelling the rare earth elements cooking. There are those days when you commune with the machine, like the character in the Harlan Ellison short story, and other days when you hate every moment. What makes me happy for data centers are the new methods of modular, energy efficient building.
The industry trend is to measure Total (life cycle) Cost of Ownership (TCO.) So you factor in the capital, the build, and then the cost to run it for the entire life cycle, spare parts, labor and all. That’s how you get to true efficiency, and how you get to the big green trend in the Information Technology industry: value and density goes up as energy use goes down. As my ultimate boss says: “IT matters.”
Peak efficiency at a webscale data center feels like a blast furnace. I experienced it firsthand on the rooftop of eBay’s new Project Mercury data center in downtown Phoenix. It was hot enough standing on a grated-steel roof with the sun beating down on an 86-degree day. Then I stepped into the hot aisle of Dell Modular Data Center and 1,920 servers blasted 115-degree air right in my face.
If eBay’s Dean Nelson has his way, that was just the beginning. His future is one of ever-greater density in data centers driving ever-greater efficiency, and he’s relying on modular data centers like the ones Dell has provided to get him there.
Sometimes the modular data centers are the standard 8-foot by 15-foot shipping containers, and sometimes they’re more unique, custom designs. But they’re always loaded to the teeth with gear. A single unit can weigh 100,000 pounds — if you drop one in, you instantly have a whole lotta computing power in a relatively small, wholly weather-proof package.
Read the rest to learn what “PUE” is…