The Planet Blog

If you’ve ever been on a tour of The Planet’s data centers, you’ve probably noticed a server segregation of sorts. In one aisle, you see big breadracks of tower servers that resemble desktop computers, and in the next, you find rack-mount servers stacked on top of each other in cabinets. Both form factors can connect to the same Internet with the same speed and performance … and they can even share identical hardware specifications. It may be confusing to see both up and running right next to each other. In fact, as a DC manager, I’m often asked about why we elect to use one over the other. Because the explanation is pretty straightforward, I thought it would be a great topic to cover in my blog debut.

Quite a bit has changed in the way we’ve built data centers over the last four years. When we opened our H2 data center, we only deployed racks of tower servers, and in our newest data center phase, D6 Phase 3, we only provision rack-mount servers. You might assume this shift to imply the complete dominance of rack-mount servers over its tower-chassis relative. Let me suggest that you’d be making an incorrect assumption.

To understand when one form factor may be better than the other, let’s look at the hardware, flexibility, space requirements and costs for each. There are no umbrella claims about rack-mounted and tower servers because each comes in different sizes/variations. Tower servers will generally share the same width, but their heights and depths can vary. Concurrently, rack-mount servers are measured by their heights in “rack units.” The rack-mount server we’ll compare is a 1U – a server that takes up one rack unit of height.

Tower Servers

Hardware/Flexibility: Given the tower server size and layout, it can accommodate a greater number of large components like hard drives, RAID and network cards.
Space Requirements: The benefits of having more space for drives and components come at the cost of taking up more data center space. A breadrack of towers can hold 20 servers, while 30 1U rack-mount servers fill a cabinet less than half the width of the tower racks. There are fewer tower servers in a given square-foot area, so we say that the data center space is less dense. When a data center is dense, it requires more power and more cooling, so a data center with only tower servers will generally require less power and cooling.
Cost: In the early 2000’s, rack-mount servers were nearly twice the price of tower servers, so the use of towers could have been a purely economical decision. Now that the rack-mount equivalent of a tower is available only a few hundred dollars more, a data center’s use of the tower form factor will likely be based on one of the other differentiators.

Rack-Mount Servers

Space Requirements: As we noted, rack-mount servers can be installed more densely in a data center than their tower counterparts. To fit more servers in the same amount of space, the rack-mount servers offer less available interior real estate. Because the server uses less space, it tends to run hotter – the heat emitted from the processor and components is contained in a smaller area – so cooling and air-flow are critically important.
Hardware/Flexibility: A 1U rack-mount server’s decreased real estate often limits the types of components that fit in a given layout and the number of drives that can be installed … it’s not likely that the server above will be employed as a huge network storage repository.
Cost: While the difference in cost between form factors isn’t egregious, the cost of running a data center filled with one or the other is significant. That’s one of the main reasons why you see the focus on efficiency in D6 Phase 3. With more rack-mount servers in a given space, inefficient use of power and cooling means thousands of additional dollars in utility bills.

When it’s all said and done, the form factor of the server you have with The Planet shouldn’t matter to you. You’re connected to the same network, in the same enterprise-class data centers, and you’re getting the same level of service and support regardless of what your server looks like. If you are interested in more the nitty-gritty details from the data center operations side of our business, leave a comment and let me know what you want to see or learn more about, and I’ll do my best to cover it.

-Jon

Do you have any plans for Tuesday, June 16, 2009, at 11:00am?

Well … cancel them.

You’re invited to join us as we celebrate the opening of our new 106,000-square-foot colocation data center facility in Plano, Texas!

How often to do you get the chance to witness the ceremonial shearing of a beautiful ribbon by the blades of comically large scissors? Whatever your answer is to that question, I would suggest that’s not often enough, so you should take advantage of this opportunity.

The grand opening event for this data center — our eighth — will feature remarks from The Planet Chairman & CEO Douglas J. Erwin and Plano City Manager Thomas H. Muehlenbeck. A light lunch and refreshments will be served, and you, as our guests, will have the opportunity to tour the ultra-secure, “green” facility.

On the technical front, the new data center uses the latest modular cooling technology from Turbine Air Systems (TAS), with high-efficiency, water-cooled chillers that eliminate the possibility of an interior water leak. The facility meets SAS 70 Type II standards and is protected by biometric security access.

If you’re keeping track at home, the addition of this raised-floor real estate brings The Planet’s footprint up to 224,000 square feet … more than five acres of enterprise-class server space.

For more event information and to register to attend, visit http://www.theplanet.com/New-Data-Center-Grand-Opening/.

If you wait too long to register, your “light lunch” might end up being a package of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter, so sign up today!

-Kevin

The top vote-getter in Katie’s quick survey about what you’d like to see more of on The Planet Blog was “Contests/Competitions,” so we’ve got a quick and easy way for all of our customers to enter to win a Flip MinoHD camcorder:

Take Our 6-Question Hosting History Survey!

It is quite possible to thoughtfully complete the entire survey in about 25 seconds, so don’t miss your chance to join in on the fun!

Click Here to Take the Survey.

We’re always looking for ways to involve you, learn more about you and give away some cool stuff, so let us know if you’ve got any other ideas for competitions or games.

The random drawing for the camcorder will occur on April 8, so get your entry submitted before 11:59pm CDT on April 7 to be eligible.

One entry per customer. One account number submitted in Question 1 of the survey will be selected at random as the winner. The winner will be notified via an email to the master user on the account.

-Kevin

To the tune of The Clash’s classic with the same name:

London calling via Internet routes
The Planet’s connected, and you shouldn’t have doubts
London calling to the hosting world
Come check out our servers, all you boys and girls
London calling, now come look at us
Our new data center is causing a fuss
London calling, and it ain’t just a fling
Our network’s a ring on the international scene

CHORUS
The Planet is coming, yes we’re moving in
A D.C. in England, now watch all Europe grin
A 10-gig connection, so you have no fear
London’s connected – and you have a computer

London calling, but not on the phone
Don’t worry, brother, your site can have a new home
London calling and it speaks like Macbeth
A Queen’s English accent accompanies each breath
London calling – and I don’t wanna shout
But you started reading – and I saw you nodding out
London calling, and this ain’t no guise
So go get the attention of someone who buys (servers)

CHORUS (x2)
The Planet is coming, yes we’re moving in
A D.C. in England, now watch all Europe grin
A ten-gig connection, so you have no fear
London’s connected – and you have a computer

Now get this
London calling, yes, you’ll be there, too
An’ you know what I said? Well, all of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
So after all this, won’t you give me a smile?
London calling

We think this is new you’ll like … you’ll like … you’ll like

Yes. The song is true. The Planet just announced a new data center in London. It features up to 20kW of power per rack, backed by N+1 redundancy on generators, transformers and UPS systems. Customers gain access to a 10GB private fiber interconnect to The Planet’s core network through our Ashburn, Va., data center, as well as local connectivity to Tier-1 providers and the major European peering exchanges.

We’ll be offering virtual racks in the space starting in April, and we’ve already begun preleasing servers there! This announcement is made possible by the colocation agreement we made with London-headquartered TelecityGroup, which operates 20 network-independent data centers across seven European countries.

Check out our London Data Center Expansion press release for more details!

-Kevin

P.S. I bet that tune will be stuck in your head for at least an hour.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many could I get for a video?

In a recent walkthrough of D6 Phase 3, I toted along a video camera to give you a first-hand look at what the data center looks like in motion. Not surprisingly, it looks exactly like it does in the pictures … only this glimpse relies much more heavily on my ability to multitask: holding a camera while guiding the tour.

If you haven’t been back to the D6 Phase 3 picture tour, head over there and check out the comment section where we answered a few key questions and explained a little more about the DC design.

One of the points I neglected to mention in the previous post is the positioning of the CRAC units in Phase 3. In other data center designs, CRAC units are positioned along opposing walls, pushing air toward the middle of the room. That positioning effectively cools the room, but our tests have shown that it can be done more efficiently by installing the CRAC units on one wall and in the middle of the DC, with the air flow going the same direction from both units … so the CRAC units are never fighting against each other.

As a bit of a bonus, the video also features a little bit of information about our power rooms and our UPS systems.

If you’ve got any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

Which do you prefer: video tours or photo tours? What else do you want to see?

-Kevin

You’ve probably been on pins and needles since you read our last blog post … anxiously anticipating the inside information of how we built a better-than-ideal-efficiency data center.

If you’re familiar with data center design, you’ve probably heard the terms “cold aisle” and “hot aisle.” A cold aisle is an aisle between racks of servers that sends cool air up through the floor (in the case of raised flooring data centers) and into the fronts of the servers. The air cools the server components and is exhausted through the back of the server as warm air, creating a hot aisle behind the server. Data centers are typically set up with racks of servers arranged front-to-front and back-to-back so that for every 2 rows of servers, only one cold aisle is needed. (If you’d like to see this setup in action, check out our popular Data Centric post.)

D6 Phase 3 uses those principles in a different way: hot and cold air are completely isolated.

Let’s take a look at how the phase is built to see what that looks like and why it is much more efficient.

In a raised-floor data center, your air conditioner blows air down under the floor into an air-tight compartment, and you insert vented floor tiles in the areas you want to cool. The large black unit in the image below is one of this phase’s air conditioners.

The metal posts you see on the ground are the braces used to create the grids upon which flooring tiles are installed.

The photo below is the bottom of a flooring tile. You’ll notice that there are no screws or bolts on the tile … it is simply laid on top of a grid of braces to make an air-tight seal. Each of the tiles is partially made out of concrete and is relatively heavy, so when a tile is installed, it’s not going anywhere unless you really want it to.

Below, you can see what the flooring grid looks like without floor tiles installed.

As we continue building the flooring, the data center appears to be taking shape … pretty standard process up to this point. But now, take a look at the air conditioning units below. Notice anything strange (aside from the fact that the covers aren’t installed)?

The return air plenum extends all the way to the ceiling of the room … now we’re getting somewhere.

I only retained a few things from my elementary school physics lessons, but one of them was that warm air rises and cold air sinks. This natural phenomenon is used in data center cooling: the air conditioners send the cold air down under the floor to cool the servers, when the servers send out warm air, the warm air rises to the top of the room, and the air conditioners pull the warm air from the top of the room to process and send back down as cold air. As Jeff mentioned in his interview, the higher the air conditioner pulls the air from, the warmer that air will be, and you don’t want to cool already cold air, so you should try and pull the hottest air in the data center.

Phase 3 goes a step further: it creates an airtight space above the ceiling tiles where all the warm air is exhausted and pulled in by the air conditioners.

So once we’ve got the floor tiles and the ceiling tiles installed, our fresh data center phase (without any server racks) looks like this:

This begs a big question: if the cold air is being sent through the floor to the servers and the warm air is being pulled from the ceiling, how do the servers pull the cold air and push the warm air without the heat being disseminated into the other areas of the data center?

Enter our new custom-made rack-mount cabinets.

The cabinet above is pulled out in one of our other data centers to demonstrate the design of the Phase 3 cabinets. The servers will pull cold air from the floor in front of the server but instead of exhausting the warm air out into an open aisle, the warm air will rise through a vent sealed to the ceiling (the sides, front and back of the cabinet are closed when the covers are installed).

So a completely installed server row looks like this:

One noticeable difference between this data center and the other data centers we’ve shown you in Houston and Dallas are the servers themselves: all rack-mount, no towers.

The rack-mount servers allow for a better power density throughout the data center, so we’ve got to make sure we can provide the power to all of our new servers in the event of a utility power outage.

We’ve got N+1 power redundancy, so for every phase, we have a dedicated backup generator, and for every data center we’ve got an extra backup generator in case any of the other generators fail. New phase = new generator. It’s pretty interesting to see the generator without its skin, right?

Now that power is accounted for, we can install our PDUs for each aisle and prepare to get servers up and running in the new phase.

A little networking and wiring, and D6 Phase 3 is ready for business! In the first picture below, you can see the orange tubes which are primary network drops into the phase … and yes, even those are sealed in the ceiling.

Head over to our The Planet’s Flickr page for a few more pictures of the new data center phase.

-Kevin

I think I’ve officially become a geek. I just got a few of the pictures from the build-out of our newest data center phase, and I’m almost ashamed to admit how excited I was to write this post as an opportunity to showcase them.

The Planet has six data centers between Houston and Dallas, and some have been built out in “phases” or semi-independent sections. This phased construction process allows us to invest our time and money more efficiently because we can create space as we need it, rather than building out an entire data center shell and having to heat/cool/power the excess space that may not actually house servers for months. Following a very welcome ramp up in demand for our dedicated servers and managed hosting, we recognized an impending need for more data center space, so our facilities team fired up their engines and began planning Phase 3 of our D6 data center … and that’s when the fun started.

Jeff Lowenberg, our vice president of facilities, spoke with WHIRtv about the progress we’ve made in improving our data center efficiency over the past year, and the new data center phase is a testament to the work Jeff and his team have done in researching and designing new data center space. With a few of these innovative ideas, we worked directly with our vendors to create custom DC solutions, and the results are beyond ideal … literally: the new phase’s coefficient of efficiency (the total power necessary to operate a data center divided by the power necessary to operate the servers alone) will be approximately 1.5, which is below (better than) the “ideal” ranking of 1.6. With a lower coefficient of efficiency, a greater percentage of our power is running servers rather than heating/cooling/lighting the data center space while maintaining a perfect operating environment for the servers.

Tune in tomorrow for a tour of the new phase’s construction where we’ll “show and tell” HOW this is possible.

-Kevin

P.S. You may have seen that we announced a new data center earlier this week – D7 – to be built out in Plano, Texas, just north of Dallas. We’re preleasing it and expect to have it ready in May, so you can expect to see a bit more info about that space on the blog as that facility takes shape.