Communications Crossroads - Summer 2008 - (Page 32)

APPROPRIATE COOLING IS VITAL, AND WASSERMANN SAYS THAT MISSION CRITICAL DATA CENTERS, WHICH HAVE TO OPERATE 24 HOURS A DAY, SHOULD EVEN HAVE REDUNDANT COOLING SYSTEMS AND TWO SERVERS SO THAT IF ONE FAILS, THE OTHER CAN CONTINUE TO PROVIDE CLEAN POWER WITH NO DISTORTION TO ANY EQUIPMENT IT’S HOOKED UP TO. environments that have a cyclic nature; in other words, network trafﬁc that increases dramatically at night and ebbs during the day. between. But smaller centers are starting to resemble larger centers,” he says. One reason is increased cooling in smaller centers, where previously there may have been no cooling at all. Mainframes were in place ﬁrst. They were succeeded by distributing computing, either in separate buildings from telecoms or in the same buildings. Now, for security and other reasons, much consolidation is taking place. Data centers can also be costly, Wassermann says, but it depends on their size. Smaller telecoms will naturally be likely to have small data centers. And data centers don’t necessarily have to be physically close to telecoms’ buildings. They should be located closest to the best ﬁber available, he says. Appropriate cooling is vital, and Wassermann says that mission critical data centers, which have to operate 24 hours a day, should even have redundant cooling systems and two servers so that if one fails, the other can continue to provide clean power with no distortion to any equipment it’s hooked up to. Cottuli also highlights the importance of planning storage center size and usage. Capacity planning should not be ignored: the ability to physically place equipment intelligently. In some 50-rack data centers, for instance, over 30 percent of the servers are plugged in but not used, but they’re still consuming power. New servers are placed wherever space is available. Cottuli sees lots of stranded capacity in data centers, meaning there’s heavy density equipment all in one location far from cooling systems, where the low-density equipment is placed. “That’s about asset management, which allows you to know which servers are not being used and can be unplugged,” he says. Capacity and Change management tells technicians the best places to locate equipment. “Telecoms will beneﬁt from knowing they don’t have to survive with existing equipment,” Cottuli says. “Products are designed to be optimized around 100 percent load levels, but when decisions were made 10 to 20 years ago, it’s time to have a fresh look, especially where older equipment is virtualizable without new buying new equipment.” In general, more and more data centers are being required to store more and more information, digital data and audio, which require lots of storage space and bandwidth. Video on demand is just beginning to grow on TV and the Internet, so data centers will continue to grow. It’s similar to the time before there were iPods. People were happy with the Walkman, but iPods spurred growth. And that’s why telecoms now need to pay more attention than ever to their data centers, as they work to get maximum performance out of their networks. Power and Cooling is Key “Because of that ﬂuctuating power demand it can be very difﬁcult to manage a data center. It needs to be ﬂexible enough to handle the power and cooling demands and to try to make the efﬁciency curve of the entire facility as ﬂat as possible,” says Cottuli. It must support the equipment without overheating and handle the rise and fall in power demands. Cottuli offered key tenets of high efﬁciency. He said UPS (uninterruptible power supplies) and distribution systems are key. With cooling, close coupled cooling—that is, using cooling systems suited to your type of processing equipment and having the cooling system as physically close as possible to the equipment—is important. He likened it to staying near your home’s air conditioning units in extremely hot weather. Scalable power and cooling should be closely matched to a business’s needs and growth. Wassermann has suggestions for how to answer the critical question: How big should your data center be? “There’s no real deﬁnition of how big a center is. They can range from 100,000 to 200,000 square feet, down to three racks with some backup power or cooling, and every size in 32 COMMUNICATIONS CROSSROADS www.ustelecom.org http://www.ustelecom.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Communications Crossroads - Summer 2008

Communications Crossroads - Summer 2008 Up Front Contents TeleBites Delivering the Broadband Future Deriving Revenue from Today's Broadband World The Right Way to Operate Data Centers Buyers' Guide Industry Calendar Advertisers DotCom Index to Advertisers Straight Talk

Communications Crossroads - Summer 2008

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