Back in the dot com bubble, there was a rush to build medium-sized data centers to accommodate the surge in servers that needed secure hosting. Many of these centers were what is called “Telephone Design.” They were less expensive to build and more manageable and quicker to bring to the market.
The Dot Com Bubble and the Data Center Glut
The bubble burst, and so came a decade of Data Center glut. As more and more companies looked for redundancy and consolidation, the glut was swallowed up. Then the age of the “cloud” was born. The cloud can mean many things to many people. To Data Center owners, it means only one thing. Revenue. And so, the birth of the large Data Centers came into being. And then, suddenly, we have a glut of Data Centers, which resulted in the consolidation of both owners and facilities.
The Latest Trend: Smaller Data Centers
The latest trend is to build smaller Data Centers with all the same infrastructure as the large ones but can be more flexible in their deliveries and prices. Colocation is an important piece of any company’s IT solution, and we design our services specifically to your needs. Colocation is simply a data center facility that allows customers to rent space for servers and/or other computing hardware.
Thin-nology’s Austin Colocation Data Center is a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility. Even if a fire were to break out, our Austin Colocation Services facility would still provide uninterrupted, continuous operation. It has all the security you will find in Tier III facilities (see Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery), plus one other thing: we are stealth. To the outside world, we do not look like a data center (see below for more). We modeled our cooling systems, using Fluent Simulation Technology, to ensure a constant temperature throughout the facility no matter the heat load. No hot air gets into the facility ever. We rent by the U or by the rack with 120 single-phase and 208 three-phase power options.
Comparing Large and Small Data Centers
A large Data Center often has a high fixed cost. Racks in a 240,000 Sq. Ft. data center must be cooled just the same as if they were in a 5000 sq. ft. Data Center. So, the fixed cost of cooling 240,000 sq. ft. that is only filled to 50% capacity means the operator must recover those costs through their current customer base.
A 5000 Sq. ft. facility can operate at a much lower fixed cost. By doing this, the savings can then be passed along to the customer base. How we calculate the cooling cost is by the amount of power required to operate, times the KW-hour cost of the electricity required. Now, a larger Data Center has more bargaining power with the suppliers than the smaller facilities. But even if they can negotiate 2-3 cents per KW versus the 4-5 cents per KW the smaller facilities will pay, their outlay is still huge.
Telephone-Design Data Centers and Their Challenges
For the “Telephone Design” Data Centers still in business, the design that made them fast and easy to build has led to high operational costs due to the way they are cooled. They deploy a hot aisle, cold aisle design, where the hot air in the hot aisle is sucked up into a plenum, and cold air is dumped into the cold aisle. This cold air is sucked through the Air Conditioning Systems from the hot air plenum.
Many of these facilities brag that they have a 15- or 20-foot plenum from which to draw and cool. But this same design is what leads to much higher operating costs and insufficient cooling. This is especially true in hot climates such as Houston, Dallas, and Austin, where daytime temperatures reach over 100 degrees. The amount of hot air is enormous, and trying to cool it means fighting a losing battle. This is where smaller Data Centers, designed properly, have a massive advantage in both cost and cooling.
How Smaller Data Centers Optimize Cooling
A small Data Center of 5-8000 Sq. Ft. can have a hot aisle, cold aisle design where zero hot air is dumped into the Data Center to be sucked out. This design requires that a plenum is engineered to accommodate only the hot air coming from the racks. The racks themselves have chimneys that allow the air conditioners to draw the air into the plenum to be cooled and then dump it back into the Data Center. This means the only hot air being cooled is coming from within the Data Center. It creates a constant, manageable temperature throughout the facility. It also means that the Air Conditioners can be “teamed” to operate only when required to maintain the desired temperature.
Since we are only cooling hot air generated inside the Data Centers, costs remain contained as the Data Center occupancy fluctuates. It also means that the customer always has balanced cooling for his/her equipment. The two things that shorten the life of physical equipment are power fluctuation and heat. In a smaller Data Center, these two factors are constant.
Security Considerations for Smaller Facilities
The other aspect of smaller Data Centers that some see as an issue is they typically don’t look like a Data Center and, as such, don’t have the external physical barriers found in the large modern Data Centers. They also cannot accommodate the large entities that have 200-300 racks. These are both true, but smaller Data Centers cater to an audience with much smaller needs—half a rack, three racks, one rack, and so on.
These customers want the same internal security features offered by the large Data Centers but at an affordable price. The external physical security, metal doors, and cages on entry are sufficient to alleviate any fears of having their systems stolen. In fact, an external physical threat is such a rare occurrence—especially as most Data Centers are manned 24/7/365—it is rarely considered when choosing a Data Center.
Conclusion
So in conclusion, we will see a phasing out of the “Telephone Design” Data Centers, more consolidation in terms of owners and facilities, and the rise of smaller design Data Centers to accommodate the needs of small to medium businesses.
