Ins and outs
May learned the ins and outs of power and cooling so he could lead the decision making for the company's data centre, as well as its expansion. "Blade servers have a lot of benefits, but they are energy hogs. We are just now finishing a three-year electrical upgrade to put a megawatt of redundant power on the floor," he says.
IT professionals must lead the charge because they understand the ramifications of environmental changes for equipment. And a data centre architect should report to the CIO or CTO, May says. "The data centre architect is going to make decisions that aren't very popular," he says. For instance, a data centre architect will go to battle over temperature costs. Facilities says if we crank up the temperature five degrees, we can save money, but that puts the equipment in jeopardy," May says.
The data centre also has to be engineered with redundancies that can be costly but are critical for disaster recovery and business continuity, he adds. For instance, May has placed the data centre on a separate, backup generator in case of a power outage on the main campus.
Increasingly, companies are anointing a data centre architect to justify the costs in hot-button budget issues, such as space allocation, says Andreas Antonopoulos, senior partner at Nemertes. "There might be a situation where the data centre appears to be only half-full, but the empty space is misleading because of the power and cooling requirements of technologies such as blade servers," Antonopoulos says.
"We've gone from using 1.5 to 3 kilowatts of power to where 15-kwh racks are not uncommon. Many data centers can't support that and need to be upgraded," Antonopoulos says.
Becoming a facilities expert on top of keeping pace with the latest IT technologies isn't easy. H.E. Butts' May recommends digging deeper into such unknown territory as electricity and HVAC by taking courses at local technical schools, subscribing to industry journals and researching vendor Web sites. "Eventually, all data centres will be completely isolated from other parts of the campus. All of their considerations - electrical, cooling, water - will be separate," he says. "We're not there yet, but you need to be ready."
Gittlen is a freelance writer in Northborough, Massachusetts. She can be e-mailed at sgittlen@charter.net.