Data Center Design: Notes from a visit to the IT Server Center

June 19, 2009 By BobGourley

My associate Ryan Kamauff has been advising clients on Green IT and has also been pulling together several lessons learned from recent data center designs and has been encouraging me to write more here about data centers. This is a favorite topic and he is right to keep pushing (so thanks Ryan). We will keep postings on this topic coming.

Last week I was treated to a tour of the IT Server Center ( http://www.itservercenter.com ) in Sterling VA. It is a highly protected data center campus designed from the ground up as the ultimate data center site. I think their business model was perfectly timed to coincide with the emergence of utility computing and the big shift to cloud based IT. I would not call the IT Server Center a cloud provider, but they serve cloud providers with the infrastructure they need to run services. The IT Server Center has many features you would want in a secure hosting facility, including perimeter fencing and 24/7 guards.

My big interest in this sort of data center is a continual evaluation of the state of the art of data center design. It is very interesting to track the way computer power used to be housed from decades ago to today. Data center operations has turned into an interesting science that requires a mastery of disciplines like construction, power generation, power distribution, power backup, communications, networking, air conditioning, backup techniques/tools,

A good recap of the history of data center design is available on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_center Wikipedia also provides a good tutorial on key concepts in the discipline of data center design (data centers can be categorized by “tiers” with a Tier 1 data center just being a basic smartly designed computer room and a Tier 4 data center being designed to host mission critical data and applications).

A good pointer to the future of data center design is the Berkley Lab site for High Performance Buildings for High Tech Industries at http://hightech.lbl.gov/datacenters.html I view this as a good pointer to the future since they have captured all the key challenges of data centers (especially challenges with energy consumption and the need to be more green).

Another reference for data center design is the video below, a tour inside a Google data center. This is a must watch for anyone interested in advanced datacenter design. These types of data center are not for everyone– I believe most large enterprises who are outsourcing to places like the IT Server Center are going to want environments much like they have today. But increasingly new computer power is going to be delivered either like the containers shown in the video or in pods cooled and powered from above.

Inside a Google Data Center: