Physical Infrastructure of a DC

What’s up GG’s? Today we’ll talk about the physical infrastructure of a Data Center!

First of all, let’s see where are we able to build our Data Center! Where should we start… okay just be inspired by others companies, that sounds like a good idea.

Google for example has several Data Center in different part of the world. United-States of America, Europe, Asia, South-America. They had different reasons to want to build Data Center here and most of them are because the city “has the right combination of energy infrastructure, developable land, and available workforce for the data center”. But it’s not the only reason. Google wanted to use “local engineering and construction expertise to re-develop an existing building”. That means that we can use an existing building instead of building an entire DC.

To sum up the Google’s chooses, most of them are justified by the quality of the evolution of the place. The fact that these places are not in extremely hot area (Finland for example) justified too why they are chosen instead of … Sahara!

What about the network cabling? Well here we have several choices and criteria to take care about. A network cabling has a huge impact on different aspects like the cost, the reliability, the exploitability and the scalability.

We can choose, for the cabling architecture of the Data Center, between ToR – Top of Rack – and EoR – End of Row.  I will not go too much in details, but here few pros and cons of Tor and EoR from the bdrahedlun.com website:

ToR Pros:

• Copper stays “In Rack”. No large copper cabling infrastructure required.
• Lower cabling costs. Less infrastructure dedicated to cabling and patching. Cleaner cable management.
• Modular and flexible “per rack” architecture. Easy “per rack” upgrades/changes.

ToR Cons:

• More switches to manage. More ports required in the aggregation.
• Potential scalability concerns (STP Logical ports, aggregation switch density).
• More Layer 2 server-to-server traffic in the aggregation.
• Racks connected at Layer 2. More STP instances to manage.

EoR Pros:

• Fewer switches to manage. Potentially lower switch costs, lower maintenance costs.
• Fewer ports required in the aggregation.
• Longer life, high availability, modular platform for server access.

EoR Cons:

• Requires an expensive, copper cabling infrastructure. Fraught with cable management challenges.
• More infrastructure required for patching and cable management.
• Less flexible “per row” architecture. Platform upgrades/changes affect entire row.

Now, what about control access? Well, you can refer to one of the previous post where we talked about security, but we will give you a very quick reminder!

First, you have to monitor everything, almost everything. Security cameras in a lot of area, restricted access in different place, the requirement of a badge to go somewhere, with restricted access for each kind of badge.

Input control too with again cameras, access by a secure portal. And to enter in the Data Center, you will have to pass behind a guard that is the only person that could allow you to pass through a single-person corridor, where employee can pass one by one only. These are the basics.

To finish this post, we’ll end with air conditioning.

IT devices are VERY exothermal. So we have to control the quality of the environment they are working. The regulation of this kind of device is very specific. For example, these kind of machines will tolerate 20°C +/- 1°C. But in IT rooms we can have 20-26°C. We can, with different air conditioner, regulate the temperature with a precision of +/- 0,3°C which is very important if we want to have a good reliability.

Okay GG’s that’s it for today! It already a lot of information to digest, but I trust in you to: take care of yourself, and obviously to stay tuned for more information!