Page 244 -

11

CHAPTER

Datacenter Design

and Redesign

hances are you aren’t sitting in an empty building, thinking about installing computers,
and wondering, “If I do install computers, how can make the process as ecologically
Cfriendly as possible?” The reality is that there’s probably already a computer on every
desk, a datacenter humming away, and a throbbing electrical bill.
In this chapter we’ll talk about issues that pertain to redesigning your datacenter. When
it is time to replace equipment, how you can downsize your datacenter and replace
equipment with energy efficiency in mind.
We’ll talk about power consumption, how you can tweak your datacenter with that in
mind, along with designing for optimal cooling. We’ll also talk about the hardware in your
datacenter and how that can be optimized.

Energy Consumption

Every 5 years computing capacity doubles. And when capacity doubles, so does everything
that goes with it. For instance, between 2000 and 2005 the amount of energy consumed by
datacenters and other infrastructure in the United States also doubled.
What accounts for this gorging? It’s going on both in the datacenter and in the cubicle
farm. Users are taking advantage of everything the World Wide Web has to offer: YouTube,
music downloads, Internet telephony, and whatever else is popular this week. But in the
server room, power consumption has spiked because of other trends, including the bloat of
low-end servers that cost less than US$25,000.

215 215

Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. Click here for terms of use.