Data Center Design - Research Paper Example

Data Center Design Introduction A data center refers to a fault resistant facility that is extremely secured and is used to house telecommunication equipment. The data center facility is designed to facilitate the accommodation of various telecommunication equipment. This equipment include modem racks, switches, and servers among other telecommunication equipment. A data center is used to support functionality of a wide range of tasks. This tasks include hosting web sites, supporting corporate data bases, and other Information and technology services. Basically, a data center of any given company presents infrastructural and technical conditions virtually required by the company for efficient running of its day to day activities. A data center has to possess the abilities of securing the installed components and servers from unauthorized access and external dangers and also, the provision of the required infrastructure that facilitate smooth running of the given company’s IT systems. The physical constructed structure has to have the ability to protect the telecommunication components against fire, floods, hurricanes and any other natural disasters. For efficiency, a data center must possess the ability to execute all the installed applications and all types of servers. In any given data center, there are several types of servers. This include file servers, print servers, mail servers, web servers, directory servers, application servers among others. Designing a data center involves consideration of various factors. In its design, the data center should have flexibility. The flexibility of a given data base greatly determines the type of hardware selected in a given data center. The hardware used should be able to be upgraded in case the designed capacity runs out. Power availability and reliability should be considered. The power supply to a given data center should be designed in such a way that there is minimal or no interruptions. This project entails engineering a test and developing a lab solution for a data center. The hardware to be used in the proposed data center consist of HP C7000 blade enclosure, NetApp 2050 and KVM. The software to be used is the Windows 2008 Ent R8, VMWAre View Horizon, ESX, and VMWare vCenter. Room ventilation The data center is composed of servers, routers, switches, among other hardware. All this are electronic devices which produces heat. This heat if not well eliminated, can destroy the electronic components in the hardware contained in the data center. Air – cooled systems are mostly used in data centers since most of the equipment are air – cooled. In this project, considering the number of hardware used and the software run on the systems, an air cooled system will be efficient. Before designing the air cooled system, the amount of heat produced must be quantified. This is either in calories, joules, Tons or BTU. To determine the heat output of the system, the total quantity of heat produced by the hardware and their components when fully functional must be quantified. This hardware components include the Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS), the Information Technology Equipment, lighting and people working in the data center building. As it had been stated earlier, some of the hardware equipment to be used in the data center are NetApp 2050, HP C7000 Blade enclosure, and KVM. Each of this equipment has different minimum ventilation requirements. To install HP C7000 Blade enclosure, there are several minimum requirements. For good efficiency of HP C7000 Blade enclosure, there are different rack requirements. According to HP C7000 Blade enclosure documentation (Hewlett-Packard Development Company, 2010), HP C7000 Blade enclosure is optimized to work with 10000 series racks. Thus to facilitate adequate airflow and to allow for servicing, the spatial requirements below are considered. A clearance of approximately 0.635 meters is left at the front part of the rack At the back, a clearance of 0.762 meters is left to facilitate adequate airflow In case of multiple racks, approximately 1.219 meters is left between the back of one rack and the rear of the adjacent racks. The design of HP C7000 Blade enclosure is in such a way that cool air is drawn into the system from the front part to cool the system, and warm air is removed from the rear part (Hewlett-Packard Development Company, 2010). Thus considering the fact that cooling of the system is facilitated by air flowing from the front part to the rear part, the front part of the rack must be ventilated adequately to facilitate flow of air into the system. Also, the rear part must be adequately ventilated to allow outflow of air from the enclosure. Care must be taken to avoid blocking of the all the ventilations of the system. To facilitate efficiency in air conditioning of the proposed system in the data center, there are certain activities that have to be done. Cabinets will be oriented in rows uniformly in such a way that the source of cooling air between two rows is common and the source for expelling hot air for given two rows is common. This is very efficient considering that heat flow is based on the fact that heat exchange is due to temperature difference. Thus in this case, there is an increase in the return air temperature which consequently increases ventilation. Also, to facilitate prevention of hot air mixing with cold air, barriers air barriers are inserted below and above the cabinets. This barrier will isolate the cold air aisle from the hot air aisle and consequently causing effective cooling of the system since there is no mixing of the cold air and the warm air. Obstruction has been found to be the major cause of poor ventilation in any given data center. Obstruction can be caused by improper alignment of the cabinets, poor cabling among other causes. Telecommunication power wire ways and cable trays are the major causes of obstruction resulting into poor ventilation. Thus for efficiency, this cabling systems will be located under the hot air aisles. Like it has been stated above, poor cabinet orientation may hinder free air circulation. Thus for efficient ventilation, the cabinets will be arranged in rows in such a way that the rows are in parallel with the airflow. This will greatly reduce the airflow obstructions. Humidification is another concern factor in any given data center. Thus, the air conditioning system must be able to control the humidity of the data system. In cases where there are humidity losses, supplemental humidification is essential to for maintaining the required levels of humidity. In the proposed data system, humidification will be eliminated by the use an air conditioning system that has the ability to isolate the bulk return air from the bulk supply air. The figure below shows the rack elevation Electrical systems The design of the electrical system in a data center should be in such a way that it meets and matches the requirements of the telecommunication equipment present in the data center. The power supply should be always available and reliable. Issues with the power system will lower the intended functionality of the data center. The data center to be designed must have extremely minimum down time. This implies that the power system must be selected carefully. The data center cannot completely withstand any down time. In this regard, a redundant power supply configuration will be done to eliminate this down times. With a redundant power supply configuration, the power supply will be designed in such a way that three power supplies will be connected to the system load via an internal isolation diode. This three power supplies are connected in parallel. Thus in case of failure of any one of the three power supplies, the load will continue to be powered by the other two redundant power supplies while the bad one is being replaced. This will ensure continuous power supply ion the data center with minimum or no down times. Read More