Re: rack power question

[Patrick Clochesy <patrick () chegg com>]

Basically, that is the state of things. You're paying for power (which is also cooling) and bandwidth/connectivity. 

Globix is only letting us run one 30A 240V circuit per rack for "cooling reasons", however even with our 6850s we 
manage to populate a good portion of the rack. However, this means that for redundancy we cannot put anyone's partner 
in crime in the same cabinet. Though Globix is the typical cold-in-front, hot-in-back setup they still seem to be 
under-capacity when it comes to cooling... I think the end of the dot-com boom put a dent in their Liebert budget. It 
amazes me places like Hurricane can't get enough space when there are once-decent shops like Globix with so much unused 
space. 

Plan your power requirements carefully, and plan on the ability to upgrade in the future. With the current trend of 
high-capacity blades, it seems that it would not be impossible to find 20-25kw per cabinet not long from now. Power 
distribution (if done right) is easy, cooling that density is the fun part. What's your cooling plan? 

-Patrick 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "david raistrick" <drais () icantclick org> 
To: "Joe Greco" <jgreco () ns sol net> 
Cc: nanog () nanog org 
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2008 9:26:37 PM (GMT-0800) America/Los_Angeles 
Subject: Re: rack power question 


On Sat, 22 Mar 2008, Joe Greco wrote: 

> Charging substantially less for rack space, even offset by higher costs for 
> power, would encourage a lot of colo customers to "spread the load" around 
> and not feel as obligated to maximize the use of space. That would in turn 
> reduce the tendency for there to be excessive numbers of hot spots. 

I wonder if we're to the point yet where we should just charge for power 
and give the space away "free".... 

When I'm shopping for colo that's pretty much the way I look at it. Power 
determines space. I need 80,000W of power at the breaker, so I need 
800sqftx15$ in facility A, and 320sqft@40$ in facility B. 

I can fit my 8 racks into either the 320sqft or into the 800. If I'm 
doing the 800, I'll probably spend a bit more up front and use 12 or 14 
racks, to keep my density down. A bit more cost up front, but in the 
grand scheme of things 4 or 6 extra racks ($6 to 10,000$) don't directly 
hurt to much. (80kW worth of power usually means you've got well north of 
$2M worth of hardware and software being stuffed into the space in my 
experience..but maybe that's because we're an Oracle shop. ;) 



Of course, I suppose for those customers still doing super-low-density 
boxes (webhosting with lots and lots of desktops), I suppose that model 
wouldn't work as well. 


ramble. 

.d 

--- 
david raistrick http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html 
drais () icantclick org http://www.expita.com/nomime.html