Selecting a Rack PDU

In this blog, we shall discuss about the configuration option and what rack PDUs are best for your data center. While deploying PDUs we have to consider the following things, What kind of power do you have? How much power do you need? How much power do you draw? What plug types do you have? How much room do you need for the future? What do you need for the future? Will you add more devices to the rack? Will you need more power in the future? In many companies some of these answers to these question will come from Facilities group, while the other answers come from IT group.

In order to calculate the power which is being used by our server and storage devices, we can add the AMP drawn of all the equipment’s that has been plugged to the PDUs. The amp drawn information can also be gathered by several ways. The equipment manufacturer provides the ‘Name Plate’ or ‘Face Plate’ power ratings. These power ratings are often calculated for the worst case scenarios. Most manufacture offer power sizing tool or capacity planning tool to calculate the power used. Intelligent rack PDUs that monitors power consumption of the server can be a valuable source for calculating the amps drawn by new servers. Power monitoring can be done on whole PDU level, individual outlet or groups of outlet.

      

     Few rack PDUs allow remote power management for monitoring the usage of power. Power outlet cycling is ideal for data center without 24 hours’ staff coverage or devices deployed in remote locations. The ability to schedule power off in an outlet allows to easily enforce IT power policies such as switching off all non-production servers after 6 PM.

     Some intelligent rack PDUs also perform environmental monitoring. With temperature and humidity monitoring, we can identify hot and cold spots in data center or within the rack. By identifying the cold spots where over cooling is taking place, we can increase the temperature on our Computer Room Air Conditioner (CRAC) units. If the space is available in the rack, then we can also add additional servers to that rack. By locating the hot zones in our data center, we can identify the cooling needs that prevent the downtime and damage to our equipment. We can receive alerts by having sensors all over the colocation floor.

     

     Over Cooling and Over Provisioning of the data center will lead to the increase in the operational cost and its harmful to the environment. With rise in cooling and power cost, the ability to monitor and control your power usage helps to promote a cost effective and greener data center. 

Rack Power – Power Distribution Units (PDU)

Today’s Data center are filled with power and storage devices with increase in power needs. We have to select the best rack Power Distribution Units (PDU) for that environment. In this blog, I will share some basic power terms and few details about rack PDU. 

• Ampere (Amp): It measures the amount of electrical current flowing through a circuit during a specific time period. It is also known as Amps. 
• Volt (V): It is equal to the difference of electric potential between two points on a conducting wire. 
• Volt-Amps (VA): It is the voltage multiplied by amps (Voltage * Amps). This rating is the apparent power, which represents the maximum power that a device can draw. Kilovolt-Amps (KVA) is the measure of VA in thousands. i.e. 2000 VA = 2KVA. 
• Watt (W): It is the measure of real power drawn by load equipment. It is used as the measurement of both power and heat generated by the equipment. 
• Power Factor: It is the ratio of real power to the apparent power. In other words, it can also be described as the power that is being being supplied Vs the power that is consumed. Most modern IT equipment has the power factor of 1, which means that the equipment efficiently uses the power supply and factors less than 1 signifies the less efficient equipment. 
• Circuit Breaker: It is a switch that protects electrical equipment from damage caused by overload or short circuit.

Data Center power is distributed with 208V single phase, high line power. Also it can be distributed with three phase power. Three phase power is used because of its efficiency and power delivering. The National Electrical Code (NEC) is the United States standard for safe insulation of electrical wire in an equipment. It states that, PDU cannot allow a continuous measure load that exceeds more than 80 % of the connector or cable rating. NEC defines the continuous load as 3 hours or longer. This is sometimes referred to as Derated Load, i.e. a 30 AMP rack PDU can only carry a maximum continuous load of 24 AMP. The NEC rated load on a rack PDU needs to be considered when data center operators want to provide power redundancy for their equipment. Without power redundancy, if the rack PDU fails the all equipment’s will shut down. To prevent this all important servers and infrastructure equipment should have multiple power supply and plugins to at least two different PDUs. Best practice is, never go above 50% of the PDU capacity. This is called PDU power balancing and provides power redundancy.  

In my next blog, I will share some details about how to select the rack PDU for your data center. Stay Tuned.......

Data Center Cooling

In data center’s, we might think that most of the heat is being produced by the servers, but that’s not correct. Because large amount of heat is being produced by the communication equipment. The main purpose of the data center cooling technology is to provides the stable environmental conditions for the Information Technology Equipment’s (ITE). In this blog, we shall discuss more about the data center cooling and the equipment’s that are being used to cool the data center.

           Most of the data centers operates in a temperate range between 65°F to 75°F. To attain this temperate, we can use cooling devices like Computer Room Air Conditioner (CRAC) or Computer Room Air Handler (CRAH) or Chiller or Economizer. There are two different types of CRACs, namely External Chiller Plant and Compressorized Chiller. CRAC units pull hot air from the top of the room and push the conditioned air to the space below the raised floor. Using perforated tiles, cold air is pushed to the front of the server. We should also prevent the mixing of hot and cold air. This can be done by using the Hot Aisle containment system, where the hot exhaust air is contained and returned to the air handlers. The complete mechanism of hot aisle containment system is shown in Figure 1.

      

(Figure 1 - Hot Aisle Containment System)

                CRAH is a device which is used to deal with the heat that are produced by the IT equipment’s. It uses fans, cooling coils and water chiller system to remove the heat from the data center. Chillers normally remove the heat from one equipment and deposit it into another element. Without chillers the temperature would quickly rise which corrupts the mission critical data and destroy hardware equipment. All these devices consume large amounts of electricity and would require dedicated power supply. We can save these energy cost by using the Economizer. It can be used in areas where winters have very cold temperature, like less than 40°F. These economizer fetches the cold air from outside and circulate into the data center. Exhaust openings and fans can be used to remove the hot air from the data center. This indeed helps to cool the IT equipment and reduce the power load on the chillers.

          The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) standard is the widely recognized air conditioning standard. According to ASHRAE, the average temperature of the data center should be between 65°F to 85 °F and the humidity should be maintained between 42°F DP to 59°F DP. Nowadays, most of the data centers are switching to computational fluid dynamics which helps in reducing the cooling cost. In my next blog, I will share other important aspects of the data center.

Reference: https://journal.uptimeinstitute.com/a-look-at-data-center-cooling-technologies/

Few Guidelines to Improve the Data Center Efficiency

“Great design is not just a solution; it is the elimination of the problem”

In today’s technical world people come with more ideas, out of which many are being implemented. For every problem, there should be a solution. So in this blog, I will share few solutions which can be used to overcome the challenges that are being faced in the data center.

• Due to the lack of trained employee’s, data centers face more issues on resource management area. So people need to be educated more on areas like data center operation and management. By doing so, we can also eliminate the dependency on a particular resource. There is a permanent solution which is to automate the tasks which are being done manually. This would significantly reduce the need for resources. 

• Another major challenge that are being faced in data center is the lack of storage area. To overcome this, storage virtualization would be the effective solution as virtualization significantly increases storage capacity utilization. It can be used to,

o   Combat exponential data growth.

o   Increase the utilization of existing storage assets.

o   Reduce storage capital expenditure (capex).

o   Reduce Operating Costs (opex) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

o   Simplify storage management.

(Virtualization)  

                                                                                                       

There are three key properties of virtualization. First is Partitioning, where we can run multiple operating system on one physical machine and fully utilize server resource. Second is Isolation, where faults and security are isolated at virtual-machine level and dynamically control CPU, memory, disk and network resources per virtual machine. And the third property of virtualization is Encapsulation, where we encapsulate the entire state of the virtual machine in hardware-independent files and re-use or transfer whole virtual machines with a simple file copy. 

• High Energy consumption is the next major problem which is being faced by the data center managers. First, by decommissioning the unused servers, the list of unused server should be found and retired, which helps in decreasing the electricity consumption. According to the Up-time Institute, decommissioning a single 1U rack server can annually save $500 in energy, $500 in operating system licenses, and $1,500 in hardware maintenance costs. Secondly, it is the consolidation of lightly utilized servers by combining applications onto a single server and a single operating system instance. Also server clustering reduces the number of backup or standby servers needed by a system, which improves availability and uses hardware more efficiently.

Above are few steps that can be used to improve the efficiency of the data center.

In my next blog, I will share more insights on different aspects of data center. Stay Tuned...

Reference: Notes from Professor, William F. Slater, Data Center Architecture Course

Challenges Faced in Data Center – Part II

Luis Gutierrez a famous American politician has once said that, “According to the Privacy Rights Center, up to 10 million Americans are Victim of ID theft each year. They have a right to be notified when their most sensitive health data is stolen.” This clearly shows that; the information’s are not stored securely. In this blog, I will continue with few more challenges that are being faced in the data center.

1.     High Energy consumption:

The current data centers are more energy efficient when compared to the earlier data centers which was built during the start of 21st century. Power consumption is the major deciding factor in determining the efficiency of data center. In order to reduce the power consumption, it must first be accurately measured. It should be measured in all the places, where the power is being consumed. It should include IT equipment, Power distribution infrastructure, Ventilation/Cooling equipment, Security equipment, Water treatment equipment, etc.  Due to more manual intervention in the tasks involved, many a times, these measurements are not being collected. This problem can be eliminated by deploying Data Center Infrastructure Management(DCIM) Tool which automatically extracts and displays the current energy usage. By doing so, they can concentrate on the areas where more power is being consumed. By implementing the DCIM tool, many data centers achieve in reducing the power consumption by 15 to 25 percent.

2.     Increasing Energy and Facilities Costs:

In the recent years, data managers are facing more problem in operating the data center due to increase in the operational cost. Approximately 40 percent of the overall cost is being spent on the employer’s salary. Next major part of the amount is being spent on power generation and IT equipment cooling. They can reduce the cost by eliminating the old systems and shift the workloads to the more efficient hardware. By doing so, they can reduce the number of server deployment by 5% to 20%. Some new features can be implemented which could be helpful in reducing the infrastructure cost. For example, Microsoft is experimenting to deploy their data center under the ocean. This could be helpful in minimizing the use of cooling equipment’s.

These are the major challenges that are being faced in the data center. However, there should be some optimal solution to overcome these problems. So in my next blog, I will share few solutions to overcome these challenges. Stay Tuned……………...

Challenges Faced in Data Center - Part I

Hello Everyone…,

In my last two blogs, I have thrown some light on the physical structure of data centers. Also, the equipment’s that are used to build the data centers are covered in my earlier blogs. Going forward, in my future blogs, I will share few challenges that are being faced in the data centers.

1.     Resource Shortage:

In today’s world, as the technology grows, the amount of work being done by the people decreases. Everything is being automated which reduces the considerable amount of workload on the people. But it’s not the case in data centers, because more people are needed to maintain them. Also few tasks in data center requires the manual effort which wouldn’t be possible without qualified people. Few statistics reveal that, 38 percent of the data centers are understaffed and only 4 percent are overstaffed. So if we want to reduce the resource in data centers, we have to find alternate way to automate the tasks that are being performed routinely. In the coming years, there is going to be a high demand for the people who have great knowledge on the data centers. So get ready folks….......!!!!!!

2.     Lack of Storage Space:

Nowadays the data centers are facing major challenges in storing the data. As the business grows, the amount of data that is being collected from various sources also increases and these data needs to be stored and processed for future use. So the data centers should be built to withstand these large volumes of data or else they have to expand their storage capacity by replacing the hardware equipment or by extending the data center to build a new storage area. Going forward, the new data centers should find an optimal solution to accommodate these large amount of data.

3.     Data Security:

As the data center people are striving hard to protect the data, many hackers are as well working hard to hack the data or to inject malicious content. In order to maintain a strong relationship with clients, the data center people have to secure the data from such malicious attacks. They are facing these security problem because of the emergence of big data and advanced targeted attacks. This makes it more important to protect the data in transit, while stored on an active device and after the stored device have been retired. Most of the attacks are being done be the cyber criminals or by the authorized user. So, the data center people have to be more vigilant while providing access to the authorized users.

These are some of the challenges that are being faced in the data center. In my next blog, I will share few more challenges. Stay Tuned………….

Tulip Data Center

Hello Everyone…,

          Hope you gathered some information about Equinix data center from my previous blog. In this blog, I will share some information about one of the largest data center which is located in India. Nowadays, more people started using internet and at the same time huge volumes of data is being collected from the user. So the data center is the key to the business, which has to be large, secure and efficient. In Bengaluru, Tulip a telecommunication provider has built one of the Asia’s largest and third largest data center in the world. It’s a Tier III data center which has a built up space of 9 million square feet and more adequate space is available all around the building for creating sub stations, spaces for generators and diesel tanks. It is a seven-storey building with two base floor space for the utilities and offices. From second floor onwards, this data center has four towers with two halls each. Also this facility has the provision for 50 meeting rooms and up to 1500 seats for staff of customers.

 

The integrated management system ensures that every equipment in the data center is managed effectively, so that any problem in the equipment is addressed immediately. This data center is designed to have 66 KV power from two separate grids and 11KV fleets are used to transmit power to each of the 20 floor plates where they are converted to 450 volts. Overall 16 generators of 4MW capacity each, are available during short and long intervals of power outages. In addition to this, four more generators are kept on standby. Also three diesel tanks are available for fuel storage. The Tulip data center is designed for up to 14,000 racks. For each rack the power is supplied from 2 different UPS system with each of the UPS system having 15 minutes’ battery backup. The power redundancy of this Tulip data center is N+1.

For cooling the equipment’s, 39 air cooled water base chillers are installed on the roof of the building. In order to improve the efficiency of the cooling system, the area of the cold aisle is contained, so that the cold air does not mix with the hot air in rest of the room. Tulip data center is fully secured in such a way that; the data center is surrounded by a concrete wall of 10 feet high with further intelligent fence of 4 feet in height. This data center is fully monitored by 1500 cameras. Two separate gates are available for the movement of staff and the equipment. Lockers are also available to store the non-permitted items. Staff, visitors and clients are thoroughly checked using the metal detectors, hand held scanners and explosive sniffers. All bags are scanned through the X-ray machine. Firewall and the best security products ensures the highest level of security of the data in the data city. Tulip data center is also protected by the firefighting system which has the smoke and heat detection sensors installed on the ceilings.

From these two blogs, we might have gathered some information about physical elements that constitutes the data center. In the next blog, I will share some information about the problems that are faced in the data center. Stay Tuned………………….

 

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h5RYflgBcM