How To Build A Data Center

How to build a data eye in 6 months for $800,000

Home healthcare business firm built information center that saves on space, power, cooling and Information technology effort

For years, Robert Wakefield and Dameon Rustin lived with the issues of keeping Snelling Staffing Service's one-time, poorly designed data center upward and running. Non only were the intricate cable runs and varied server makes and models difficult to keep direct, merely the building itself tended to chemical compound their direction headaches.

"Our xv-ton air-workout unit was water-cooled, just the building [management] didn't clean the cooling belfry very often," says Wakefield, vice president of Information technology at Snelling Staffing and Intrepid USA, a habitation healthcare business firm also owned by Snelling's parent firm, Patriarch Partners. "Muck would get in, clog up our strainers and shut downward the AC unit to our information center. That was a large problem."

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

Things began to alter quickly in one case Patriarch bought upward Intrepid in 2006. Wakefield and Rustin, Snelling's director of engineering, were charged with building a brand-new data heart that would non only solve the current Snelling issues, but also house Intrepid'southward information middle and be prepare to support whatsoever time to come growth.

"We had to build expandability into it because 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 about 100% growth room."

The downside? They needed to practice all that with a upkeep of $800,000 and a window of merely half-dozen months. "Information technology was a claiming," Wakefield says.

But information technology was a challenge they met head-on. Today, Snelling and Intrepid's new ane,100 square foot data centre in Dallas efficiently houses a variety of equipment, including:

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

* Three EMC storage systems, including an EMC CX400, a CX3-20 iSCSI system and an old SC4500, also as a Quantum tape library (compare products).

* A multifariousness of networking components, including shared virus scanners and Spider web surfing control appliances (compare products).

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

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

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

Getting there

Wakefield and Rustin start visited several data centers to get an idea of what could and could not be washed. They also looked at a number of dissimilar locations earlier deciding in January on the Dallas edifice. Then, the real planning began.

"One time nosotros had the dimensions, everything else came from that," Wakefield says. He and Ruston drew up ten different floor plans and began computing how many servers they'd need, and how much cabinet space. At that point, requirements began to autumn into place. "Loftier-density became a requirement; virtualization became a requirement," he says.

Although the new data eye is only 150 square feet larger than the onetime one, it needed to support more than 40 additional servers, plus provide room for growth. Wakefield considered going the blade server route to save infinite, just before long learned they were prohibitively expensive.

"Blades were pretty high price-wise, and we had bought some of the Sun 10-series boxes in the past," he says. "They are AMD-based, and so they utilize less energy and put out less heat. And they're dual-core, dual-processor with nigh 8GB of RAM, so we could fix [virtual machines] on a good chunk of them, and that saved united states a lot of space too."

Wakefield says space constraints as well led him to buy new Chatsworth CPI TeraFrame high-density racks, each of which can agree as many every bit 36 1U servers. "They're vented at the superlative and handle air circulation really well," he says. "We're on a raised floor, so the cooling comes from below, it gets sucked in the front end of the chiffonier and then vented out the back and direct upward the height. It's very efficient."

Chatsworth Tera Frame Server Rack

He addressed the AC problems by purchasing the glycol-based units, which are completely self-contained. "Now, all of our cooling is independent of the building," he says. "So if the edifice needs to shut down their water supply, information technology doesn't shut down my data center."

Wakefield has also planned for optimal power usage. A 600-amp ability cabinet powers everything in the data center. "We have a UPS tied to that, and and so nosotros have a power distribution unit out on the flooring in the data center that provides feeds to each chiffonier," Wakefield explains. "Each cabinet has the ability for a single box to plug four power supplies into it, and each of those ability supplies is on a unlike circuit for back-up."

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

Wakefield says the new data center optimizes efficiency by enabling Snelling and Intrepid to share as much equipment every bit possible. Snelling'south 43 locations are linked via an MPLS network to the data heart, while Intrepid'southward 115 locations use a diverseness of DSL, frame relay and MPLS, with most gradually moving to MPLS over fourth dimension. Each company has its own router, but they share a 10Gbps core switch in the information center. "Everywhere we can, we try and put in a mutual platform to salvage both companies coin," he says. "Nosotros have a common core switch, besides as common email, virus scanning and surf command for the Spider web."

Future-proofing

All of the new data center's cabinets are pre-wired, a movement that was more expensive upfront, but will offer huge payback over time. Each cabinet has a 10G connectedness to a core switch. "If you demand to put a new server in, you lot don't have to pull a fiber run all the way back to the switch," Wakefield says. "It's all there already. Nosotros only driblet the server in, connect in our patch panels and nosotros're ready to go."

In addition to prewiring 10G and fiber, he besides future-proofed by installing Category 6 cabling to support not but both companies' data only also their voice via a new Cisco VoIP system. And all of this means the new data centre should easily serve the two companies (and whatsoever others that may be added) for anywhere from five to vii years.

"Eventually, depending on new fiber engineering science, I may have to add some more fiber in, but in the thou scheme of things, it's pretty solid for several years to come," he says.

Doing it right

Afterward many 80-plus hour weeks for his staff, Wakefield says his squad successfully cut over the Snelling side of the business in May and moved in the Intrepid side, from its old home in Edina, Minn., in July. They did it all, start to terminate, in less than 6 months. "I wouldn't recommend that timeframe," he says.

But overall, Wakefield and Rustin are pleased with the results. "We spent years dealing with a poor setup," Wakefield says. "In the old building, when we wanted to add a server, nosotros were always having to trace runs out to decide where they went, or crawling upwards on ladders to pull cablevision," Wakefield says. "Over the years, it simply drove us crazy. And Dameon and I ever said, if we ever go to build our own, we know what we're going to do. We'll do it right. And I call back we did."

Cummings is a freelance writer in North Andover, Mass. She can be reached at jocummings@comcast.net.