Posted: 5/28/2012 6:08:42 PM EDT
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I saw a commercial where they were showing off their data center and they were using racks and racks of towers. Why would you build a data center out of towers instead of rack mount chassis?  VS.  |
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They may be trying to do things super-cheap. However, since towers are less dense, they would have to be getting their space almost free.
One data center that I have used provides 23" telco racks. Since data stuff is almost all 19", a lot of people in there buy 23" shelves and set towers on them. Me, I made some 2" spacers for each side to get the mounting strips in to 19". The reasons for being in such a datacenter are twofold... It is sitting in a main telco, VERY well connected, and the space/bandwidth are dirt cheap. I think I recall seeing an IBM commercial some time ago, touting how their large systems could consolidate zilions of individual servers, and they used towers in that, to kind of exaggerate the space savings. My installation of servers to handle this year's traffic and sales growth (and to replace a number of aging systems) was a blade system.... 40 sockets and 160 dimm slots in 7U INCLUDING the networking, and done less expensively than individual servers. Cabinets cost money, floor space cost money. Density doesn't have to be expensive. |
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Cheaper computing. The trade off is that the hardware itself is not redundant. They may be using vitalization or cloud type tech in the event one of those systems drops out. It doesn't make sense (to me, at least), to blow the money on racks, flooring, cabling, ducts, etc. to make the room 4x- 10x larger, to try and save 10 or 15% on chassis... Unless you got your room for free or something. |
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Our dedicated server product is run on Shuttle chassis. We have ~10000 shuttles in our dedicated rooms, cabled similar to what you see there. The rest of our products/infrastructure is all rack-mounted. but.... You didn't answer the question. Why? It was to offer our customer's their own separate server at a low cost. Off the shelf consumer hardware was cheaper than using rack-mounted server hardware for that application. Just before I left the DC, they were looking at Dell's viking rack mounted server (12 servers in a 3u rack mounted package) to replace the shuttle offering. |
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Cheaper computing. The trade off is that the hardware itself is not redundant. They may be using vitalization or cloud type tech in the event one of those systems drops out. It doesn't make sense (to me, at least), to blow the money on racks, flooring, cabling, ducts, etc. to make the room 4x- 10x larger, to try and save 10 or 15% on chassis... Unless you got your room for free our something. I've seen places where thats the case though. Its not hard to do the calculation. A) Calculate the cost of a cabinet, plus the servers to put in there and how much you can fit into it and the floor space it uses. B) Calculate the cost of some cheap shelving from home depot and some desktops and how much floor space it uses. Will it cost more for solution A or B given the required floor space for each setup? Some "Data Centers" I've been in are just some office spaces with overhead ladder racks. No redundant cooling and power. But they still manage to make money hand over fist because theres not much choice close by and people want cheap over reliable. |
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Some "Data Centers" I've been in are just some office spaces with overhead ladder racks. No redundant cooling and power. But they still manage to make money hand over fist because theres not much choice close by and people want cheap over reliable. That is true... but at some point, you still have to consider the size of the room. One of my friends works for a very large, famous hosting company, and I just turned down a job with them (too long of a commute, and they wanted too many hours). They are in the business of doing hosting CHEAP ( ~$5.00/month), and they still use real rackmount stuff - and good rackmount stuff. Granted, they're a very large outfit, so the economies of scale do kick in, but still... cheap doesn't have to mean ghetto. |
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Some "Data Centers" I've been in are just some office spaces with overhead ladder racks. No redundant cooling and power. But they still manage to make money hand over fist because theres not much choice close by and people want cheap over reliable. That is true... but at some point, you still have to consider the size of the room. One of my friends works for a very large, famous hosting company, and I just turned down a job with them (too long of a commute, and they wanted too many hours). They are in the business of doing hosting CHEAP ( ~$5.00/month), and they still use real rackmount stuff - and good rackmount stuff. Granted, they're a very large outfit, so the economies of scale do kick in, but still... cheap doesn't have to mean ghetto. most data centers were built 10-15 years ago when system requirements for space, power and cooling were MUCH larger. many data centers could easily operate on 1/3rd the physical size they needed 10 years ago. the space and capacity already exists this is a cheap way to fill it. |
| The first datacenter I stuck my personal stuff in was built inside a very old building along the bay in Baltimore, MD. And old brick building with gothic looking wooden internals. The "server room" had a splintering wood floor. Most of the room was shelving with regular PCs and they had only a few cabinets. The company has been bought by competitors twice at this point and moved into a real datacenter. I think they still have a few shelves of PCs in there. |
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I have seen this done when a special card will not fit in one of the newer blade type server cases. The larger rackmount server cases cost more and its just easier to use a desktop case. I keep 2 8U cases on hand for this for our radio system. 1 is in the console and the extra is in the back on standby waiting on a new motherboard. The supported sound card is large.
I doubt that is what is happening here. No peripherals appear to be plugged in to most. I am betting they are doing it to save money. |
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most data centers were built 10-15 years ago when system requirements for space, power and cooling were MUCH larger. Space, maybe... but the data centers I saw 10-15 years ago were so lean on power that it was ridiculous. 100W/ft^2 wasn't even thought of 15 years ago, in my experience. |
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most data centers were built 10-15 years ago when system requirements for space, power and cooling were MUCH larger. Space, maybe... but the data centers I saw 10-15 years ago were so lean on power that it was ridiculous. 100W/ft^2 wasn't even thought of 15 years ago, in my experience. Around 2000 one major Telco was using 200w/ft^2. MCI was doing the same, I can talk about them because they're gone now. Most of the ones I see built have so much excess AC power it is ridiculous. We just got through with one where they put in 12 Meg of generation at 5kW with UPS and then turned off the lights, because the 5 year old other side of the data cetner was only 50% loaded. I regurlarly see data centers with 8-10 2 Meg or larger genearots for backup power. They're using 150-200 w/ft^2. Not my area but as the problem has been explained to me the real issue they're fighting is cooling capacity vs the heat generated by the new machines on heavily loaded white space. |