Inside CERN's multi-megawatt data center

Re:Inside CERN's multi-megawatt data center by walrus01 on Friday February 10, 2017 @05:26PM (#13619467)

It is interesting to see that they apparently built this as a traditional raised floor environment without hot/cold aisle separation. Looks like something from 20 years ago. Building datacenters on the multi megawatt scale (example: 10-12kW thermal per 44U cabinet, equivalent to two 208V 30A circuits per cab), it's far more efficient to put everything straight on concrete slab, build hot and cold aisle separation and do fiber and power trays entirely overhead.

If I had to guess the PM on this was somebody who'd built traditional supercomputer datacenter environments 15-20 years ago for some entries in the top 50 of the top500 list, and scaled up what they knew how to build.

edit: Looking at the photos in more detail it looks like they're retrofitted hot/cold separation into a traditional 20-year-ago style raised floor environment. The fact that there's zero overhead ladder racks carrying AC power (or -48VDC cabling) and zero overhead fiber trays means that everything is under the floor... Very costly and labor intensive compared to modern methods of building a datacenter. Also means that it's not designed to be changed or modified very often, if ever, and it's a huge forklift upgrade if the power and fiber layer 1 topology ever needs to change.

https://home.cern/sites/home.web.cern.ch/files/image/about_s...

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Re:Inside CERN's multi-megawatt data center by PaulHoule on Friday February 10, 2017 @05:50PM (#13619608)

They built it in 2002, which was almost 15 years ago.

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Re:Inside CERN's multi-megawatt data center by Angostura on Friday February 10, 2017 @07:13PM (#13620097)

And probably designed it quite a few years before that.

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Re:Inside CERN's multi-megawatt data center by arca_vorago on Friday February 10, 2017 @08:06PM (#13620324)

Do you have any good links or reading material on datacenter design where you get your claims from?

Datacenter design is something that has fascinated me for a long time, ever since I pretty much solo-rescued a teir2 that had been in disrepair (had a cray in the corner...), but I have often though about trying to do one from the ground up with new techniques. I mostly just tried to get tours from l3, and other vendors I worked with to get an idea, and keeping up with googles published stuff, but I find a glaring lack of good citation for claims on isle design, temp/humidity control method standards, etc.

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Re:Inside CERN's multi-megawatt data center by Stratoscope on Friday February 10, 2017 @11:17PM (#13620987)

> hot/cold aisle separation

Since I didn't know what that meant and don't know much about datacenter physical design in general, this made for some interesting reading:

https://www.google.com/search?q=datacenter+hot+cold+aisle

The image search was also helpful:

https://www.google.com/search?q=datacenter+hot+cold+aisle&tb...

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Re:Inside CERN's multi-megawatt data center by Create on Saturday February 11, 2017 @04:25AM (#13621896)

They have long hit the limits of that building, they rent space in a DC across the lake, but salaries being too expensive, they built one in Eastern Europe. They probably regret that by now, moreover the PM of the host country is openly hostile to international orgs. Btw cern is recruiting disposable temp technicians through AstroTurfing. Even looking for a full stack dev! See other post. Their pr and tv studio(!) is bigger than some experiments.

Now that a grain of salt has been handed over, go ahead and downvote as usual.

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Re:Inside CERN's multi-megawatt data center by sctb on Saturday February 11, 2017 @06:02PM (#13625384)

Please don't throw around baseless accusations of astroturfing, and don't complain (preemptively or not) about downvotes. Neither of these things contribute towards the kind of discussion that we're trying to have here.

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