Data Center essentials

Infrastructure: Data Centre design should cover the following

• Availability through a design that includes appropriate use of tier levels and the
ability to support multiple tiers in the same datacenter

• Agility through a design that’s flexible and adaptable, ready to align IT resources
with changing business objectives

• Efficiency that’s implemented with an emphasis on appropriately sizing IT

equipment and its supporting cabling, power, and cooling infrastructures

• Future-proofing by design to escape the costs and inconvenience occasioned by

the need to refresh technology

• Environmental consciousness (“going green”)

• Intelligent monitoring that enables power consumption to be monitored at every

level in the power distribution hierarchy

Essential criteria for data center design:

 Physical capacity: Space and weight capacity of equipments
 Power :Connection to different part of grid and utilization of UPS and other
redundant power supply to increase uptime
 Cooling:
 Bandwidth : This is dependent of device and customer requirement
Raised Floor: Data center should have raised floor constructed on a grounded framework
consisting of interchangeable tiles. The height of raises floor is usually between 18’’-40’’
.The raised floor serves as a separation between the room and the slab.

Power supply: Electric power requirements for data centers became an important issue
for.
 computer technology, was creating higher heat density in smaller and smaller
geometries. The simultaneous compaction and increase in electrical power caused
concern over the ability to cool future generations of IT equipment.
  facilities that support the Internet
Total power required can be calculated by Total Rack Location Unit i.e. total equipment
power consumption plus 70 % of this for HVAC units, fire control, monitoring etc.
Data center electricity usage by different components:

fig 1. component wise electricity usage percentage

UPS: Uninterruptible Power Supply is critical for high availability of services. UPS
should be capable of maintaining power supply for a minimum 15 minutes during power
failure and carry 150% of powerload.
Backup Power Generator: Generator should be uses as an alternative source of power.
Installation of generator should be properly done accordind to code compliance.
 fig2. PUE and DCE relationship
The cooling infrastructure: is a significant part of a data center. As much as 40% of a
data center's energy bill is from cooling equipment. The complex connection of chillers,
compressors and air handlers create the optimal computing environment, ensuring the
longevity of the servers installed within. Proper HVAC(heating ,ventilation and air
conditioning) system should be in place.
temperature range humidity range
18°C to 27°C 5.5°C DP to 60% RH & 15°C DP

Bellow different cooling techniques practiced in data centers are given:

BEST PRACTICE STATE OF THE ART

Free Cooling Direct Liquid Cooling
Air Side Economizers Close-Coupled Cooling
Water Side Economizers
- Evaporative Cooling
- Dry Cooling
PDU (Power distribution units): Most data-center-class PDU (power distribution units)
and UPS vendors offer systems with a modular capacity in rack-sized cabinets that can
initially be outfitted to deliver 25 percent to 50 percent of total capacity. As power needs
increase, additional power modules can be easily installed in the existing cabinets without
adding floor space and without downtime.
Floor planning: A data center floor plan has two components
1. structural layout : This includes location of walls rooms,support column and key
utility connections.Basic principles of structural layout are
•

fig.3: room dimension and number of row

2. equipment layout: The equipment layout shows the footprint of IT equipment and the
footprint of power and cooling equipment. IT equipment usually defined as rack
locations without regard for the specific devices in the cabinets. Basic principles of
equipment layout are
• Control the airflow using a hot-aisle/cold-aisle rack
• Provide access ways that are safe and convenient
• Align the floor or ceiling tile systems with the equipment
 • Minimize isolated IT devices and maximize row length

Rack Location Placement: The floor layout dependent on the number of rack location
that are possible in the room . On average, the number of IT rack locations possible can
be estimated by dividing the room area by 28 sq ft / rack (2.6 sq meters / rack)1, the
actual number of racks for a particular data center can vary greatly from this typical
value.

Servers and cabling:

Data centers may have rack mounted servers or blade servers. The storage is basically
provided by FC SAN though cheaper alternatives like iSCSI SAN’s and NAS servers can
work parallel with FS-SAN storage systems. FC SAN is fastest and low latency storage
servers while iSCSI SAN and NAS servers are easily manageable and cost effective.
Data centers may have rack mounted servers or blade servers.
General consideration for cabling
• Fast deployment and accurate moves, adds, and changes
• Support for storage devices (i.e. fiber channel, SCSI or NAS)
• Redundancy and path diversity
• High performance and high bandwidth with growth factors incorporated(10G or
higher)
• Proper racking, enclosures, pathways and access flooring

With daily system backups becoming a routine, downloading information must be done
as quickly as possible, meaning data center cabling systems must provide fast data rates
and be capable of reliably handling the stream of data while enabling migration to higher
data rates when necessary. The RJ-45 connector is very common but one can use LC,SC
or ST connector.
In cabling use Point of Distribution (POD) rack for modular and manageable connection.
Both ends of a cable should be labeled for better management of network connectivity
problems. POD contains the following items
• Switches and sub switches: for administrative work
• Network Terminal Servers: allows connect physical console of a device to a port.
• Cat5/6 and Fibre ports for cross patching
Fig 4. A Flexible Data center architecture