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Data Center: Data Centers
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John Dayberry in the Hickory Record, the manager of Google's under-construction data center in Lenoir, N.C., met yesterday with folks at the Hickory Rotary Club. Tom Jacobik told the group of about 100 that Google's data center there could be operational before the year's end or early in 2008. Among the tidbits gleaned: Google plans to employ approximately 200 people at the facility. (That seems to be the rule of thumb for new Google data centers.) Google's getting involved in IT skills education and retraining at local colleges. And Jacobik, one-time director of tactical operations for Oracle, is helping supervise construction of another Google data center in Charleston, S.C.
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Data centers have their roots in the huge computer rooms of the early ages of the computing industry. Early computer systems were complex to operate and maintain, and needed a special environment to keep working. A lot of cables were necessary to connect all the parts. Also, old computers required a lot of power, and had to be cooled to avoid overheating. Security was important; computers were expensive, and were often used for military purposes. For this reason, engineering practices were developed since the start of the computing industry.
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The SPARC data center's objective is to facilitate data exchanges between participating scientists. Established in June 1999, the number of data sets is growing rapidly. Several data sets are now online. Reference data sets based on UARS measurements and model analyses are available. High-resolution temperature and wind data from radiosondes, which were purchased from NOAA, are currently available for 1998-2006, but will be augmented in the near future. Solar forcing and historic ozone data have been acquired.
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A data center can occupy one room of a building, one or more floors, or an entire building. Most of the equipment is often in the form of servers racked up into 19 inch rack cabinets, which are usually placed in single rows forming corridors between them. This allows people access to the front and rear of each cabinet. Servers differ greatly in size from 1U servers to huge storage silos which occupy many tiles on the floor. Some equipment such as mainframe computers and storage devices are often as big as the racks themselves, and are placed alongside them.
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"Effectively managing a data center has been a challenge for some time... the challenge increases with the use of physical and virtual machines in heterogeneous environments," said Drue Reeves, Vice President and Research Director for the Burton Group. "Server virtualization introduces a whole new world of resource mobility and growth. Data center management software must scale to reduce the complexity associated with virtualization-induced server sprawl and enable the automated, dynamic data center."
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Perot Systems' data center in Florence will expand upon the region's efforts to attract businesses in the technology sector. It will occupy 24,000 square feet of space, which will include 20,000 square feet of raised access flooring. The center will have fully redundant UPS systems, backup generators and the ability to support the latest new server technology. It will be modular and expandable.
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