The Planet Blog

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.