8 Datacenters For Cloud's Toughest Jobs
Each of these innovative datacenters represents the best in class for a design or operational factor. Google's employee sauna? That's just a bonus.
Companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook don't just innovate with products: Just look at their datacenters. The designs and operations playbooks of these new centers aim to lower costs, increase reliability and maintainability, and improve agility, while reducing energy use and carbon footprint.
As big data and cloud computing push the limits of traditional datacenters, new trends in datacenter innovation have followed. Google started the ball rolling when it scaled up its search operations starting in the late 1990s. By 2001, Google, still three years away from its IPO, was building its own servers from piece-parts, seeking not only economy but also reliability and ease of maintenance. Prior to 2003, Google was investigating putting large numbers of servers in a shipping container. That year it applied for a patent on the idea of the modular, drop-in-place datacenter.
Back then, Google was saying very little about its datacenter operations. A favorite Silicon Valley guessing game was to speculate on how many servers the company ran. The search giant was gradually forced into more transparency by the rapid rise of Facebook, which discussed its operations in detail.
Google's containerization patent was issued in 2007; it wasn't until 2009 that the company confirmed that it had been installing modular, containerized server farms since 2005. Google is now quite chatty about its datacenters.
Facebook built its first from-scratch datacenter in Prineville, Ore., open-sourcing the designs of everything it used -- from servers and storage to networking and even the specifications for datacenters themselves. In April 2011 Facebook announced the Open Compute Project, a non-profit charged with the stewardship of these hardware blueprints.
As Microsoft, Apple, and eBay began building large scale, cloud datacenters during the last half decade, they joined the pioneers in looking for ways to reduce energy consumption in their datacenters. Innovative power and cooling schemes multiplied. Soon the competition shifted to green energy: How much of a datacenter's power could be supplied from renewable sources?
Each of the following cloud-scale datacenters breaks new ground in some dimension of its design or operation -- from modularity and efficiency to scalability and green energy -- and each has something to teach us about how datacenter design is evolving. Take a closer look.
At 700,000 square feet, this facility ranks in the top 10 in terms of physical size in DataCenterKnowledge.com's 2010 listing. Its claim to fame is high-density containerization: Microsoft's "ITPAC" boxes each contain about 2,500 servers. They have no backup power. If an ITPAC fails, its compute load is designed to fail over to a spare ITPAC.
Microsoft is continuing to use these containers in new data centers, such as this one in Boydton, Virginia. The company claims that its modular approach and self-contained ITPACs let it build out a data center in half the time traditionally required.
HP, IBM, Dell, and Sun (Oracle) sell containerized data centers. Presumably they all pay a license fee for Google's patent. Google and Microsoft are the biggest cloud players using this modular technique, and eBay is experimenting with the approach. eBay claims to have measured (momentary) PUE values between 1.04 and 1.02 for one of its server boxes under load. Power unit efficiency is a measure of how much the electricity coming into the building is used in computing versus other facility needs. Most traditional data centers operate at PUE of 2.0, or twice as much power delivered as used in computing.
Google does not generate its own wind power to run its Finnish data center; rather, it buys 72 MW from the local grid, which is fed by a wind farm in Sweden.
This video offers a tour of the data center's cooling system. Housed in a refurbished 1950's paper mill, the data center cools its servers by pumping seawater from the Gulf of Finland via pumps and pipes originally built for mill use. Before being returned to the sea, the water detours to a facility where it is cooled by mixing with freshly pumped seawater to reduce environmental damage.
As befits its location, Google's facility includes a sauna that's open to employees at any time.
This data center is arguably one of the most secure and robust on the planet. Its internal network may be one of the fastest. The NYSE uses 400,000 square feet in the facility, 300,000 of which are devoted to power and cooling. It rents another 60,000 square feet of co-location space to hedge funds and investment firms that feel the need to be as close as possible, electronically, to where sellers are matched up with buyers. (The NYSE goes to great lengths to make sure the playing field is level for all of its co-lo customers; no single one has a microsecond's advantage over another, though they all enjoy a significant edge over traders located farther away.)
The New York Times ran a story last year on the fortunes being made by the owners of co-lo space near the stock exchange's Mahwah center -- these landlords are cleaning up as energy traders, and some are incorporating as real estate investment trusts in order to skirt taxation.
Apple was the first company to implement solar power in a data center, and it did this in a big way. First announced in 2012, the 500,000-square-foot Maiden facility planned to start out 60% self-sufficient in power and move toward 100%. A year later, Wired reported that Apple had removed the 100% promise in its website.
Solar power is entirely insufficient to shoulder the whole load for a data center, even an installation as large as the 200 acres Apple has devoted to solar panels at Maiden. Apple always planned to install fuel cells to produce the bulk of the power. The Bliss Energy fuel cells (pictured) generate around 40 MW from methane. Today Apple produces about 55 MW of power and Maiden uses 100 MW, by some estimates.
Still, Apple takes pride in Maiden's status as the only data center facility of its size and type to have earned LEED Platinum certification.
This facility in Miami was opened as a "data hotel" just as the dot-com boom started imploding. Now owned by Terremark, a division of Verizon, it operates as a carrier-neutral access point. 160 networks converge on this building, and traffic from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean is routed to more than 148 countries. Seven tier-1 Internet providers cluster in the "NAP of the Americas" building, and 15 domestic fiber backbones connect to it.
The 750,000-square-foot facility is number 3 on DataCenterKnowledge.com's top 10 listing from 2010.
Facebook's Altoona data center, shown under construction last November (top) and as it will eventually look (bottom), was intended from the outset to be powered by renewable wind energy. Iowa is an ideal situation for a wind-powered data center; the state led the nation in 2012 in percentage of energy generated from wind (25%). Initially Facebook aimed to develop a wind farm near Altoona, but ended up 100 miles away, in Wellsburg. The data center draws power from the grid into which Wellsburg feeds its energy.
Said to be the world's longest data center, the building currently under construction provides 476,000 square feet of floor space. The site could eventually grow to comprise three buildings.
(Images: Facebook)
Facebook's Altoona data center, shown under construction last November (top) and as it will eventually look (bottom), was intended from the outset to be powered by renewable wind energy. Iowa is an ideal situation for a wind-powered data center; the state led the nation in 2012 in percentage of energy generated from wind (25%). Initially Facebook aimed to develop a wind farm near Altoona, but ended up 100 miles away, in Wellsburg. The data center draws power from the grid into which Wellsburg feeds its energy.
Said to be the world's longest data center, the building currently under construction provides 476,000 square feet of floor space. The site could eventually grow to comprise three buildings.
(Images: Facebook)
-
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like