Archive for April, 2008
The consequences of data center failure can be pretty catastrophic for your business, so unsurprisingly, you will have very high expectations about availability and reliability. Unfortunately for many of us, our expectations will not be met by reality. Very often the system that is our data center facility is significantly less reliable than we might [...]
Continue ReadingElectricity is a traded commodity with a Futures Market, exactly like oil, tea and pork bellies. The wholesale electricity price is driven by analysts’ perceptions of the relationship between supply (how much is readily available and at what cost) and demand (how much is required now and in the future).
The wholesale electricity price is one of the [...]
A large open room with hundreds of Kilowatts or even Megawatts of electrical energy being consumed and a set of powerful fans blowing air in sounds like an ideal place to make a great fire! Detecting fire quickly and extinguishing it before it takes hold is a critically important feature of all data centers.
Fire Detection
Early [...]
Continue ReadingDuring my time at BT I set the Data Centre team the challenge of getting Asset Management right, the team thought I was just being stupid and unreasonable but buckled down and with a bit of hard work got it close to 100% right with processes to keep it right. As a direct result of [...]
Continue ReadingThe basis of intelligent cooling is that it allows us to deliver only the cooling that is required to meet our temperature requirements. By reducing the flow of air down to that which is actually needed (rather than just blowing as fast as we can) it is possible to reduce the energy demand of our [...]
Continue ReadingJust found a great new product on the web: DimDim a freeware collaboration tool that looks and feels really cool. There are a number of critical things that DimDim have done to ensure success. The first is to make the product really lightweight, there are no downloaded Java modules, so much easier to make work in a [...]
Continue ReadingToday I spoke at the Sustain IT, Green IT Conference in Central London, The topic I chose was Green IT through Discipline and Hygiene. My conference notes as well as two of the other presentations are available here on my .mac Public Folder. (I love the whole .mac Web experience, like most things Apple it is just [...]
Continue ReadingMy little brother Laurie O’Donnell who is a top man in the Education world, (winner of the George Lucas Education Foundation Global Six) was asked to speak to a group recently on the subject of leadership and identify some top tips for aspiring leaders. Here is what he came up with:
Be a lifelong learner - as soon as [...]
Continue ReadingThe thing about data centers is just how much power they use. This one in Cardiff, Wales uses about 20MW of power and has huge strings of batteries storing power to drive the UPS units. The batteries are kept in dedicated battery rooms that are air conditioned to keep the cells cool and maintain a [...]
Continue ReadingPhase 2 - Design End State
If we are not careful, data centre moves are seen as just another big IT cost, and a pretty open ended cost at that. Anyone with experience in this space knows that many moves go off the rails and that the planned dates, costs and benefits are not met. [...]
Continue ReadingPhase 1 - Discovery
Anyone who knows about Data Centres understands something of the complexity of moving services to a new site. Usually this needs to be done in a hurry, with no service disruption and at minimum cost.
The drivers for data centre moves are:
* Mergers and Acquisitions
* Geographic Consolidation of Sites
* Building Moves
* Expansion
Like [...]
Data Centre Basics
There are some basics that just need to be done to keep a data centre efficient and as green as possible. Maintaining the floor is often a task that is left too late. Gaps and unnecessary holes in the floor are bad news and lead to the mixing of hot and cold [...]
Continue ReadingSeparation of Hot and Cold Aisle
The photograph above was taken in BT’s Rochdale Data Centre. It shows the use of curtains to separate the hot and cold aisles, thereby reducing the amount of hot air that mixes with cold air from the plenum floor and dramatically increasing cooling efficiency. Inside the curtained off [...]
Continue ReadingDC Power in Data Centres
The discussions amongst Data Centre specialist about the relative benefits of AC and DC are by far the most heated. In my opinion these are mainly driven by the technology that the protagonists are most comfortable with. The 20th Century Data Centre guys are all into AC, it is [...]
Continue ReadingCooling for Free (Almost)
Fresh air cooled data centres simply draw fresh air from outside (via filters) and pump it under the plenum floor rather than the refrigerated and recycled air that is used in 20th Century Data Centres (see picture above). This approach can reduce the energy required to cool a site by 80% [...]
Continue ReadingInterview with Haroon Malik
Malik - Do you think that, as yet, many businesses have a sufficient understanding of the importance of the human aspect of IT within the data centre? ie writing policies, managing infrastructure, making mistakes etc…
O’Donnell - It may be a bit unkind to some of my colleagues but my experience shows that [...]
How did we get to the modern data centre design? Why do most data centres look the same? Why are they so inefficient in how they consume electrical power? Why do they typically have a raised plenum floor and air handling units that keep air at fixed temperature ranges and humidity levels?
I guess the first [...]
I have been working in the Data Centre business for many years and every time I take on a new role I get a surprise. A surprise that the basics are not done, that the lessons I learned all those years ago still haven’t reached this far! I guess that I should have stopped being [...]
Continue ReadingWhere does all the power go?
Electrical power generally originates from a machine that turns water into steam to turn turbines (or HEP, Gas Turbine) - in all cases some form of original energy is used to drive a generator set. Typical coal, nuclear or oil fired power stations generate steam to drive the generators. [...]
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