Colocation in the US.

Wed Jan 24 17:54:20 UTC 2007

Paul brings up a good point. How long before we call a colo provider
to provision a rack, power, bandwidth and a to/from connection in each
rack to their water cooler on the roof?

-Mike

On 24 Jan 2007 17:37:27 +0000, Paul Vixie <vixie at vix.com> wrote:
>
> drais at atlasta.net (david raistrick) writes:
>
> > > I had a data center tour on Sunday where they said that the way they
> > > provide space is by power requirements.  You state your power
> > > requirements, they give you enough rack/cabinet space to *properly*
> > > house gear that consumers that
> >
> > "properly" is open for debate here.  ...  It's possible to have a
> > facility built to properly power and cool 10kW+ per rack.  Just that most
> > colo facilties aren't built to that level.
>
> i'm spec'ing datacenter space at the moment, so this is topical.  at 10kW/R
> you'd either cool ~333W/SF at ~30sf/R, or you'd dramatically increase sf/R
> by requiring a lot of aisleway around every set of racks (~200sf per 4R
> cage) to get it down to 200W/SF, or you'd compromise on W/R.  i suspect
> that the folks offering 10kW/R are making it up elsewhere, like 50sf/R
> averaged over their facility.  (this makes for a nice-sounding W/R number.)
> i know how to cool 200W/SF but i do not know how to cool 333W/SF unless
> everything in the rack is liquid cooled or unless the forced air is
> bottom->top and the cabinet is completely enclosed and the doors are never
> opened while the power is on.
>
> you can pay over here, or you can pay over there, but TANSTAAFL.  for my
> own purposes, this means averaging ~6kW/R with some hotter and some
> colder, and cooling at ~200W/SF (which is ~30SF/R).  the thing that's
> burning me right now is that for every watt i deliver, i've got to burn a
> watt in the mechanical to cool it all.  i still want the rackmount
> server/router/switch industry to move to liquid which is about 70% more
> efficient (in the mechanical) than air as a cooling medium.
>
> > > It's a good way of looking at the problem, since the flipside of power
> > > consumption is the cooling problem.  Too many servers packed in a small
> > > space (rack or cabinet) becomes a big cooling problem.
> >
> > Problem yes, but one that is capable of being engineered around (who'd
> > have ever though we could get 1000Mb/s through cat5, after all!)
>
> i think we're going to see a more Feinman-like circuit design where we're
> not dumping electrons every time we change states, and before that we'll
> see a standardized gozinta/gozoutta liquid cooling hookup for rackmount
> equipment, and before that we're already seeing Intel and AMD in a
> watts-per-computron race.  all of that would happen before we'd air-cool
> more than 200W/SF in the average datacenter, unless Eneco's chip works out
> in which case all bets are off in a whole lotta ways.
> --
> Paul Vixie
>