Industry giants order data centres to go

A data centre in a container? It might have sounded far-fetched until quite recently, but now a handful of companies offer just that. And they’re not obscure little start-ups somewhere out in left field, either. The players in this emerging market include IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Development Co (HP), Dell Computer Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc, and Silicon Graphics International Corp (formerly Rackable Systems until Rackable acquired Silicon Graphics earlier this year and adopted its name.) These and other vendors of modular data centres each have their own twists on the idea, but in many respects all are remarkably similar. They pack the essentials of a data centre into a shipping container, either 20 or 40 feet long by eight wide and eight high. The unit is self-contained, needing only to be connected to electrical service and to water for cooling. It can be delivered on a few weeks’ notice, set up in a parking lot or on a roof and put into service in a week or less. If you’ve never seen one, you’re not alone. There are relatively few of these modular data centres in service today. “I’d very much describe it as early-stage technology,” says Jud Cooley, senior director of engineering at Sun. HP, which launched the POD last fall, has its first couple of customers in the U.S., says Lisa Taylor, manager of HP Canada’s solutions infrastructure practice, but none yet in Canada. Sun was seeing “a pretty interesting ramp in the business” before the recession slowed everything down last fall. But “our phone has still been ringing because one of the big factors for this is time to deployment,” Cooley says. “We’ve got one of these located in just about every geography in the world right now.” Among those using modular data centre technology are two computer industry giants: Microsoft Corp and Google Inc. Microsoft already has a data centre in Chicago that uses servers pre-packaged in containers. The data centre, used to provide online services such as Hotmail and Microsoft Search, is a forerunner for future Microsoft facilities that will be even more modular, says Daniel Costello, Microsoft’s director for data centre research and engineering. Servers at the Chicago centre are in containers inside a building, while infrastructure such as cooling and electrical systems looks more or less like that in conventional data centres. But Microsoft is already talking about what it calls its Generation 4 data centre design, which will modularize everything from servers to generators to cooling systems. It probably will not have a roof – a concept video produced by the company shows what looks like a walled parking lot with a secure gate. Efficiency part of appeal Costello says the modular approach is more efficient and less costly because it uses fewer materials, and different parts of the data centre can be built to different levels of reliability. Today, a data centre housing different services requiring different levels of availability is usually built to the “highest common denominator.” And, he says, modular data centres have a cash-flow advantage because they don’t require companies to build now for future needs. Instead, they can add capacity as they need it. “We see a 30% reduction in the cost to supply the same service,” he says. And there are some environmental benefits because of the reduction in materials – including concrete, which Costello says is responsible for 5% of industrial greenhouse gas generation in the U.S. Google revealed in April that it has been packing the servers that power its many data centres into standard shipping containers since 2005. More than 1,100 custom-built servers fit in each container. It makes sense that companies like Google and Microsoft, which need large and constantly growing amounts of data-centre capacity, would look at modular technology. But does the idea fit those with more ordinary computing needs? To some extent yes, says Tarun Bhasin, server market analyst at International Data Corp (Canada) in Toronto. The modular units were developed for organizations that want increased energy efficiency as well as data centres that can expand easily as business needs grow, he says. Cloud-computing and hosting providers, web 2.0 businesses and those with high-performance computing needs are examples. But other enterprises might use the containers as disaster recovery sites, for temporary or rapid capacity expansion or in remote sites, Bhasin says. He adds that designing a complete system rather than components gives manufacturers some opportunities to fine-tune the parts to work together more efficiently. The ability to expand a data centre rapidly, or open a new one, is another advantage. Jason Coari, senior marketing manager at SGI, says the benefits of modular data centres have a lot to do with power and cooling. He says his company developed its Ice Cube technology largely because of the problems customers were having providing the necessary power to run and cool their growing data centres. “We found actually a lot of data centres couldn’t even get the power that was required to run these servers,” he says. Coari says the Ice Cube can cut cooling costs by as much as 80%, thanks to a design optimized for air flow and the replacement of fans in individual servers with 16-inch-diameter fans that push air over a water-cooling loop. Further power savings come from running the entire system on rectified direct current rather than the usual alternating current, and from measures such as rack-level uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) rather than larger power backup systems for an entire data centre, he says. Plug in, turn on? The idea of a data centre in a container conjures up the image of simply driving the unit to its location, plugging it in and turning it on. That’s not too far from the truth, but the reality is a little more complex than connecting a cable and flipping a switch. How long the units take to prepare, deliver and put into service will depend on both the vendor and the customer. The modules will usually be somewhat customized. Vendors will typically install the servers and other hardware to customer specifications at their plants. An HP POD takes about six weeks from order to delivery, Taylor says. Bernie Oegema, site and facilities manager at IBM, estimates 12 to 16 weeks from order to delivery for IBM’s offering. Then they will send the ready-to-run containerized units to customer locations. Once a unit arrives, connections to power, networking and water cooling systems “can happen in a day,” Coari says. SGI also wants its customers to do initial shakedown testing to make sure everything is in working order, which takes around half a day, Coari says. Others are a bit more conservative; Sheldon Gayler of HP technical services suggests allowing about a week to get a POD up and running. Sun’s Cooley estimates about a week also, though he says customers’ bureaucratic issues can be more intractable than the technical ones and he has seen it take as long as six months. It’s not quite as simple as plugging it in and turning it on, but at typically two to four months from order to operation, the lead time is still shorter than the two to three years to plan, build and commission a conventional data centre. The price is right – for some As for the cost of one of these units, think in the ballpark of half a million dollars. Coari says a 40-foot Ice Cube with all the internal infrastructure but without servers and storage installed will cost $350,000 to $400,000. Generators for backup power and chillers for cooling are external and not included in that price. IBM’s Oegema says a 20-foot IBM Portable Modular Data Center would start around $500,000. Sun’s eight-rack unit lists for $550,000, although of course, Cooley acknowledges, “nobody pays list.” Coari says many of the early adopters are in government. HP’s Taylor agrees and says the financial services sector is also interested. The military is also showing interest – which should be no surprise given its need to move facilities around in the field. “If that area starts to get hot,” Oegema says, “you just move it.” Cooley adds universities and the telecom sector to the list, and all vendors say the units aren’t limited to specific types of customers. When the first modular data centre products appeared last year, SGI’s Coari says, “very few people said ‘oh, what are you doing, this doesn’t make sense.’ Everyone really got it.” That doesn’t mean everyone rushed out and bought one, of course. The idea is still new, and most IT departments are still taking a wait-and-see attitude to it. Microsoft’s Costello says he has talked to a number of people in other companies who admit they are waiting to learn from early adopters like Microsoft. Coari agrees. “I think a lot of CIOs and executives that would want to use this are looking for some front runners,” he says. The biggest obstacle for modular data centres may be cultural, says Bhasin at IDC. “Some IT staff may not be entirely comfortable in investing in an infrastructure where the life cycle is still an unknown.” The containers may also not be as comfortable for IT people to work in as a traditional raised-floor data centre, he notes, and splitting infrastructure between a conventional data centre and one or more containers parked outside the building could be inconvenient. Still, IDC’s Bhasin expects containerized data centres to win over some IT departments. “We see this product as a solution that will complement existing data centres rather than replacing the brick-and-mortar data centre.”

Industry giants order data centres to go

News | June 15, 2009

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