Yahoo powers data center using Niagara Falls; Google raises data center temperatures
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, temperature monitoring
If I received an invitation to visit the offices of Google and Yahoo, I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time snooping 
around the desk of the company founders. I’d rather spend my time checking out their data centers. Just imagine being among the machines that crunch all that search and email data zipping around the world. Just imagine what the physical security must be like at their data centers…
Yahoo last month announced plans to build its greenest data center in Lockport, N.Y. Yahoo co-founder and Chief Yahoo David Filo explains in his blog that the data center will be designed to use 100% outside air to cool the servers. And the resource used to power the data center and the servers will be the renewable hydroelectric power from the Niagara Falls. Read more
The not so funny side of Network Management
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, temperature monitoring
Something odd happened today.
I was in a planning meeting with my manage
r and my AT&T Tilt started to vibrate. I find this very annoying. Of all things to happen during this super exciting meeting, this had to take the cake. Yes, I am being sarcastic and a bit over dramatic. The issue is still the same, I hate being annoyed.
The real point to this rant is to point out the subject of the alert. It was a SMS page from my Ravica tempature probe. It had been violated.
This issue raised multiple questions. The first, and most important, would be how to politely excuse myself from the meeting. In general, this wouldn’t be a hard thing to do, but my manager was excited about the new data room expansion project. By excited, I mean elated, and by elated, I mean that he expected everyone to have the same level of passion or face the most harsh punishment executed on mere mortals.
Knowing that I could lose my admin privileges, I forged on. I told Jon that something is happening in the sever room and had to leave. He said “ok” and went on with his conversation.
Puzzled, I quickly went into the server room and found the issue. Brandon, our new, green intern had placed his super hot cup of coffee next to the temp sensor. He was in the process of cleaning up cables and listening to the Ramones on his headset.
The heat from his coffee cup quickly raised the temp around the sensor.
From this I have learned two things. The first is that you should never leave your interns unattended. They can cause way too much damage. The second is to not locate your temperature sensor where someone can obstruct it in any way.
Now I have to explain this to my boss. Wish me luck.
- JimmyD
Five major data center outages reported last week
Filed under: Data Center, power monitoring, SensorProbes, smoke detector
The website Data Center Knowledge recently published an alarming report about five major data center outages that occurred in the past week. Here is a brief breakdown from the article.
- “On Monday June 29, Rackspace Hosting (RAX) experienced a power outage at its Dallas data center that left several areas of the facility without power for about 45 minutes, knocking many popular customer web sites offline.
- “Early Thursday Equinix Inc. (EQIX) data centers in Sydney, Australia and Paris each experienced power failures. While the power outages were brief – Equinix said the Sydney event lasted 12 minutes while power was restored in Paris in just one minute – many key customer sites took considerably longer to recover their systems. The Sydney event led to disruptions for VoIP service in parts of Australia, while the Paris outage caused downtime for the popular video site DailyMotion and the French portal for hosting firm ClaraNet.
- “Google App Engine, the company’s cloud computing platform, had lengthy performance problems on Thursday, experiencing high latency and data loss.
- “A fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle late Thursday night left many of the building’s data centers without power. The fire in an basement-level electrical room triggered sprinklers and caused extensive damage to generators and electrical equipment. The damage left tenants with backup plans offline for hours, and those without backup sites down until temporary generators restored power early Saturday morning. The biggest impact was at payment gateway Authorize.net, which was offline for more than 12 hours, leaving its merchant customers unable to process credit card sales. Other sites experiencing lengthy downtime included AdHost, GeoCaching and Microsoft’s Bing Travel.
- “Early Sunday, July 5, a fire at 151 Front Street, the major carrier hotel in Toronto, knocked out power on several floors of the facility used by Peer 1 networks. Power was restored in about 3 hours, after a damaged UPS unit was bypassed.”
The author, Rich Miller then goes on to point out some tough questions and the lessons learned from these outages.
Although it is surprising that data centers of this size can experience an outage like this, what is even more surprising is that it all happened in a week’s span. I wonder, is the National Security Agency going to look into this?
The equipment used to monitor this size data center is monumental, but even the smallest IT department can obtain economically priced sensor equipment, like the Bitsight8, combined with Intelligent Sensors, like the AC Voltage Detector and the Digital Voltometer.
The future of data center design
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, temperature monitoring, water leak monitoring
I just read that the NSA is going to build a 20 acre data center in Utah. This one million square foot center will allow the NSA to decentralize its efforts and provide better security. Just imagine the amount of power it will take to operate a data center of this size? This Slashdot article points out that one of the biggest reasons why the 
government is building this compound is due to its power consumption and the current location’s inability to provide the needed electricity. The government estimates that it will use at least 65 megawatts of power or about the same amount that Salt Lake City consumes.
“The agency got a taste of the potential for trouble January 24, 2000, when an information overload, rather than a power shortage, caused the NSA‘s first-ever network crash, taking the agency 3 1/2 days to resume operations. The new data center in Utah will require at least 65 megawatts of power” - Salt Lake Tribune
Another cool data center design is the one that Google is planning to build. The entire center will be built on a floating barge, and will use the waves of the ocean to help power the facility. It will also use ocean water to cool the equipment.
Last, but not least, is the underground data center in Sweden. This has to be the coolest data center ever! It is located underground, can withstand a hydrogen attack, has a waterfall and a greenhouse. It can generate its own power, and is equipped with triple redundancy Internet backbone access.
I wonder, what type of environmental monitoring sensors do they have? What type of redundancy and fail-safes? Designing a data center like these is a monumental task. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for Data Center Design.
- Jimmy D
Solar power and your network
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, Intelligent Sensors, SensorProbes
I just finished an article written by Robin Lloyd, titled “Solar Power to Rule in 20 years.” Alternative energy sources have always been my passion, so I read on; maybe it would shed some light on the subject (lol – had to say it). Robin quotes Ray Kurzweil saying, “There is 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100 percent of our energy needs.” Can you imagine being able to generate all the electricity required to run your server room? Imagine being the person who brings this technology to your company?
I spent my lunch time researching my proof of concept design. I Googled Solar Panels and found everything from cool DIY YouTube videos to full service companies. Finding a package wouldn’t be that difficult. Monitoring the package and integrating its data into our current network would be a little more involved.
Monitoring the output of a solar panel can be done with the Ravica Power Monitor. The power monitor can read both 120v and 22v. With this monitor you are able to determine up/down state and measure voltage on a constant basis. With this data you can be alerted on the sensor exceeding a pre-defined threshold with industry leading notification options like: SNMP traps, email, SMS, MMS and the recently released Skype support. You can also use the data to trend the panels output.
I was done, a quick proof of concept that could work. Imagine being able to show your company how much the IT department is saving! It might be a dream now, but someday it will be reality. Bigger ideas have been planned on the back of a cocktail napkin. Mine was in a Google note book, so I am a step a head!
Did you notice that the price of oil is up again?
- Jimmy D
Data center power outage alerting
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, Intelligent Sensors
We have already discussed the importance of monitoring temperature and humidity in the data center. Making sure that the investment your company has made into its networking hardware is well protected is paramount. However, normal temperature fluctuations are not the only potential danger to data room equipment. Power outages are another potentially hazardous event.
You’ve probably already placed UPS devices at the appropriate positions within the data center; which is the first step to protecting your investment. But if the power fails in the middle of the night and your UPS kicks in to keep your vital equipment running, how long will the battery backup keep your servers up and running, or better yet, your air conditioners and HVAC systems?
With the Ravica AC Voltage Detector, you can receive alerts when your systems switch to battery backup. Knowing immediately when your equipment is no longer running on line voltage can mean having the extra time to get a generator up and running or the core power issue resolved before batteries run out of juice and other systems begin to fail.
Temperature can even come back to bite us in this scenario. If your data room isn’t getting the proper cooling and ventilation, because the air conditioners or HVAC systems are no longer operational, you are now not only contending with power failures, but data center hot spots and equipment overheating as well.
The AC Voltage Detector is a simple sensor that works with any of the Ravica SensorProbe models. It detects voltage at 50 VAC to 250 VAC and runs on a open/closed contact switch system. You simply plug the cable into your UPS, like you would with any other piece of hardware. When the sensor detects the presence of line voltage, it reports a NORMAL status. When the power fails and the UPS switches itself on, the sensor automatically detects the change and reports an ALARM status.
Perhaps not every scenario calls for that extra line of defense, but when you consider the cost of data room equipment and the potential cost of that equipment’s failure, some extra measures to ensure its stability just make sense.
~ Jon Mills
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Higher temperatures keep data centers cool for U.K.’s weather forecaster
The U.K. government’s Meterological Office (Met Office) wants to increase the temperature of some of its data centers, according to a report in eWeek Europe. While it’s traditional to keep data centers cool, the Met Office wants to move out some of its more temperature-sensitive machines, such as tape drives, presumably so that it would enable it to be more efficient at keeping the temperature for the rest of its equipment on an even keel.
The government agency is using its modeling know-how to model the airflow around servers in its data centers to help it locate hot- and cool-spots. The knowledge would enable it to better distribute equipment, according to the article.
As InsideHPC points out, the move is similar to efforts deployed by Argonne National Laboratory’s Leadership Computing Facility. The agency shaved $25,000 a month off its electricity bill by using Illinois’ cold temperatures to chill the water to cool its systems.
Jeff Sims, ALCF project manager told HPCwire: “The trick is to find the warmest chilled water temperature you can live with at a given machine load, thus reducing the electric load on the chillers and maximizing the free cooling period.”
As part of the Met Office’s overhaul of its high-performance computing systems in the next 18 months, the agency also plans to use direct current (DC) instead of alternating current (AC) in its servers to “avoid the large losses of power during conversion from AC to DC,” according to eWeek. It quotes Met Office IT chief Steve Foreman as saying:
“We take the power off the mains, put it through the UPS so it is goes to DC, convert it back to AC,step it up, step it down, move it around a bit, and then we take it down into the machines for the current required … We are asking suppliers if there is any way we can reduce all that power loss so that we can just take DC out of the UPS [Uninterruptible Power Supply] and straight into the machines. We reckon we could save about 5% of our power use just by doing that and taking out those losses.”