How To Build A Small Data Center

How to build a data center in six months for $800,000

Dwelling house healthcare business firm built data center that saves on infinite, power, cooling and IT effort

For years, Robert Wakefield and Dameon Rustin lived with the bug of keeping Snelling Staffing Service's erstwhile, poorly designed information center upward and running. Not only were the intricate cable runs and varied server makes and models hard to keep straight, just the building itself tended to compound their management headaches.

"Our xv-ton ac unit was water-cooled, but the building [direction] didn't make clean the cooling tower very often," says Wakefield, vice president of IT at Snelling Staffing and Intrepid USA, a domicile healthcare firm also owned by Snelling'due south parent firm, Patriarch Partners. "Muck would become in, clog upward our strainers and close down the AC unit of measurement to our information center. That was a large problem."

In add-on, the building owners would not give Snelling the OK to put in a diesel backup generator to power the data center. "Let's just say they weren't very helpful," says Wakefield, who spoke nigh his data center project at the recent Network Globe IT Roadmap Briefing and Expo in Dallas (see a list of upcoming IT Roadmap events).

Things began to modify quickly once Patriarch bought up Intrepid in 2006. Wakefield and Rustin, Snelling'due south director of technology, were charged with building a brand-new data center that would not only solve the current Snelling issues, but too house Intrepid's data middle and be fix to back up whatever future growth.

"We had to build expandability into it considering Patriarch is a private investment firm, and their goal is to buy more than companies and roll them in," Wakefield says. "We were told to give ourselves near 100% growth room."

The downside? They needed to do all that with a budget of $800,000 and a window of merely six months. "It was a challenge," Wakefield says.

But information technology was a claiming they met caput-on. Today, Snelling and Intrepid'due south new 1,100 square foot data center in Dallas efficiently houses a variety of equipment, including:

* A total of 137 servers (45 for Intrepid and 92 for Snelling), 37 of which are new dual-core, dual-AMD Opteron processor-based Lord's day Fire X-series Unix servers (compare products).

* Three EMC storage systems, including an EMC CX400, a CX3-20 iSCSI organization and an old SC4500, as well as a Breakthrough record library (compare products).

* A variety of networking components, including shared virus scanners and Web surfing command appliances (compare products).

* A Liebert 100kVA uninterruptible power supply (UPS).

* Two Emerson 10-ton and 1 Emerson 15-ton glycol-based AC units.

And even with all of that, Wakefield says he still has room to add 9 more server racks.

Getting there

Wakefield and Rustin start visited several information centers to go an idea of what could and could not exist washed. They as well looked at a number of different locations before deciding in January on the Dallas building. Then, the real planning began.

"Once we had the dimensions, everything else came from that," Wakefield says. He and Ruston drew upwards x unlike floor plans and began computing how many servers they'd demand, and how much cabinet space. At that point, requirements began to fall into place. "High-density became a requirement; virtualization became a requirement," he says.

Although the new data heart is only 150 square anxiety larger than the old one, information technology needed to back up more than twoscore additional servers, plus provide room for growth. Wakefield considered going the blade server road to save space, simply soon learned they were prohibitively expensive.

"Blades were pretty high cost-wise, and we had bought some of the Sun Ten-series boxes in the past," he says. "They are AMD-based, so they use less energy and put out less estrus. And they're dual-core, dual-processor with about 8GB of RAM, so nosotros could set [virtual machines] on a proficient chunk of them, and that saved united states of america a lot of space likewise."

Wakefield says space constraints besides led him to purchase new Chatsworth CPI TeraFrame high-density racks, each of which tin can hold every bit many equally 36 1U servers. "They're vented at the peak and handle air circulation actually well," he says. "We're on a raised flooring, and so the cooling comes from below, it gets sucked in the front of the cabinet and so vented out the back and straight upwards the top. It'south very efficient."

Chatsworth Tera Frame Server Rack

He addressed the Air-conditioning bug by purchasing the glycol-based units, which are completely self-independent. "Now, all of our cooling is independent of the building," he says. "So if the building needs to close down their water supply, it doesn't close downwardly my data center."

Wakefield has also planned for optimal power usage. A 600-amp ability cabinet powers everything in the data center. "Nosotros accept a UPS tied to that, and then we accept a power distribution unit out on the floor in the data heart that provides feeds to each chiffonier," Wakefield explains. "Each cabinet has the ability for a single box to plug iv power supplies into it, and each of those ability supplies is on a unlike excursion for redundancy."

And if that's non enough, he'south also planning to soon install a generator. That will provide backup ability not but for the data centre, but for critical business organization areas that support payroll and billing, so that Intrepid and Snelling can both stay open up for business even during a power outage.

Wakefield says the new information center optimizes efficiency by enabling Snelling and Intrepid to share as much equipment as possible. Snelling'southward 43 locations are linked via an MPLS network to the data center, while Intrepid's 115 locations employ a diversity of DSL, frame relay and MPLS, with most gradually moving to MPLS over time. Each visitor has its own router, simply they share a 10Gbps core switch in the data center. "Everywhere we can, nosotros try and put in a common platform to save both companies money," he says. "We have a common core switch, also as common email, virus scanning and surf control for the Spider web."

Futurity-proofing

All of the new data heart's cabinets are pre-wired, a move that was more expensive upfront, but will offer huge payback over fourth dimension. Each cabinet has a 10G connection to a core switch. "If you lot need to put a new server in, you don't have to pull a fiber run all the style back to the switch," Wakefield says. "It's all there already. We but drib the server in, connect in our patch panels and we're ready to go."

In addition to prewiring 10G and cobweb, he too future-proofed past installing Category six cabling to back up not only both companies' information but as well their vocalism via a new Cisco VoIP system. And all of this ways the new information middle should hands serve the two companies (and whatever others that may be added) for anywhere from five to vii years.

"Eventually, depending on new fiber technology, I may take to add together some more than fiber in, but in the one thousand scheme of things, it's pretty solid for several years to come," he says.

Doing it right

After many 80-plus hour weeks for his staff, Wakefield says his squad successfully cutting over the Snelling side of the business in May and moved in the Intrepid side, from its one-time home in Edina, Minn., in July. They did it all, start to cease, in less than six months. "I wouldn't recommend that timeframe," he says.

Only overall, Wakefield and Rustin are pleased with the results. "We spent years dealing with a poor setup," Wakefield says. "In the former building, when nosotros wanted to add together a server, we were ever having to trace runs out to determine where they went, or crawling upward on ladders to pull cable," Wakefield says. "Over the years, it only drove united states crazy. And Dameon and I e'er said, if we ever get to build our own, we know what nosotros're going to do. Nosotros'll do it right. And I remember we did."

Cummings is a freelance writer in Due north Andover, Mass. She can exist reached at jocummings@comcast.net.