The Big Reno - Small Space
It has been a busy month and we are well on our way to creating an affordable mini data center. Okay it is more of a server room but with our virtualization initiative we will host more servers per square foot in this space using less electricity to power and cool the mission critical application assets of our clients than any data center in the Greater Toronto Area.
How can we do this you ask? Well let me share some of our plans with you and how far we’ve got so far as we really have made great strides.
The room itself is an old storage space which we referred to as the bunker as it had 3 unfinished concrete walls and one steel studs wall finished with drywall along with an old wooden door. We buried all our spare equipment and old office furniture in this space as it was deep within the belly of the beast we call Websdepot Head Office. Since we were paying for the square footage as part of our lease it would make sense to actually use the space for something other than storage. So the renovation began. Estimates for the proposed work came in and I gladly approved them as this space would very quickly bring in revenue and dare I say it? PROFIT by going green!
As the renovation began, the data drops were mapped out, an independent electrical panel to serve just this space was installed and all the electrical wiring conduits were planned out to accommodate all the new 42U server racks coming in. The suspended ceiling was installed, the HVAC system supplying the entire building was disabled for this space as we knew that to keep our cooling costs down and go green a more efficient cooling solution dedicated to just this space would need to be implemented. The floor and walls were finished to make it look like the typical boring data center so that it does not take much imagination to compare our green virtually condensed space with an equivalent old school data center. The one non concrete wall was reinforced and a massive solid steel door was installed with heavy duty secure combination entry system.
Everyone got really exciting when the server racks arrived as we could finally see the finished product for the space and that means we were close to the actual virtualization work. The following week the water cooled air conditioning solution was installed. It would use less power than our 2 portable A/C units and HVAC system for the equivalent space where we housed our own internal servers under a configuration of space most of our clients currently have themselves at their sites.
Then end of the month the web enabled camera system was setup covering the entry and exit points to the space as we will want our clients to be able to see where their information assets sit and that we indeed keep the lights off in this space unless one of the techs is in there around 9am or 4pm filling out the daily operations checklist. They will even be able to zoom in on the thermostat and see that we set it to 22 degrees Celsius as it’s a server room not a freezer. I mention this because studies have shown that the life cycle of server and networking equipment does not change if running in a 19 versus 22 degree Celsius environment if the air flow is optimised. Yet you don’t need David Suzuki to tell you that for each degree Celsius raised you save on the cooling energy costs.
Electricians just finished wiring up the UPS systems in the racks and we are now awaiting the server and related toys to build the virtual server hosting environment based on the Citrix XenServer platform. That’s our secret sauce of this green initiative - so I saved the best for last in this blog post revealing one major part of our going green virtually strategy which will outperform all other data centers in the Greater Toronto area.
More on storage virtualization which is another key component of our strategy to come next week. Can’t wait for the new Dell servers to arrive.
Happy Computing!