Re: rack power question

["vijay gill" <vgill () vijaygill com>]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 2:15 PM, <michael.dillon () bt com> wrote:

> Given that power and HVAC are such key issues in building
> big datacenters, and that fiber to the office is now a reality
> virtually everywhere, one wonders why someone doesn't start
> building out distributed data centers. Essentially, you put
> mini data centers in every office building, possibly by
> outsourcing the enterprise data centers. Then, you have a
> more tractable power and HVAC problem. You still need to
> scale things but it since each data center is roughly comparable
> in size it is a lot easier than trying to build out one
> big data center.

Latency matters. Also, multiple small data centers will be more expensive
than a few big ones, especially if you are planning on average load vs peak
load heat rejection models.


> If you move all the entreprise services onto virtual servers
> then you can free up space for colo/hosting services.


There is no such thing in my experience. You free up a few thousand cores,
they get consumed by the next lower priority project that was sitting around
waiting on cpu.

> You can even still sell to bulk customers because few will
> complain that they have to deliver equipment to three
> dara centers, one two blocks west, and another three blocks
> north. X racks spread over 3 locations will work for everyone
> except people who need the physical proximity for clustering
> type applications.

Racks spread over n locations that aren't within a campus will be more
expensive to connect.

/vijay


> --Michael Dillon