Modular Electrical Design in Data Centers

Best Practices

Thursday, 29 July 2010 14:04

Written by jeffrey clark

A business planning construction of a new data center has numerous critical decisions that it must make throughout the process. One of the first decisions it must make is how “big” a data center to build. Not only must the company evaluate its current needs on the basis of various considerations, it must also evaluate its future needs. A data center that barely meets current needs will not be able to support the requirements of the business if that business grows significantly.

But evaluating future business needs is, to be sure, an uncertain process. Building a data center that is much too large can cost the company in terms of both initial capital expenditures and ongoing operational expenses. Building one that is too small can limit the growth potential of the company. On the other hand, even if the company builds a data center perfectly sized to meet business demands in, for instance, five years, the company must still own and maintain essentially unused equipment over that five-year period. Furthermore, the company must be sure that the cost is properly amortized over the five years, since beyond that time period, a new data center or data center expansion project will likely be needed if the business continues to grow. These considerations may seem like a no-win solution: companies must either build a data center that is too small, and thereby save on costs, or build one that is too large, and hemorrhage money until the business grows to fit the IT resources dedicated to it. The current difficult economic conditions exacerbate this problem, and increasingly, companies are simply throwing their hands up and turning to the cloud to provide their IT resources. The cloud offers easily accessible, highly scalable IT resources without any capital expenditure whatsoever. But some companies must build data centers—even if it’s only cloud-computing companies that provide these IT services. One way around the problem of planning the perfectly sized data center is modularity. A data center that can be easily expanded by quickly and simply adding new “chunks” of infrastructure is one that can change “on the fly” as business needs vary. In such a case, a company need plan for business needs in the distant future, thereby taking much of the risk out of building a data center.

According to a Gartner paper entitled “Use Best Practices to Design Data Center Facilities,” modularity is a key component of data center design: “the concept of modularity...enables the data center facility to change and adapt as needed, with minimum renovation and change to basic building systems.” Thus, modularity is the key to overcoming the problem of how big a data center to design.

Although modularity in all aspects of data center design may be more or less desirable, modular electrical design is one particular area in which this principle can be of great benefit. Increasing IT resources by simply adding more servers and more racks seems simple enough, but the process is often more complicated than it may seem. For instance, how will these additional resources be powered? Simply building a larger-than-needed electrical system in the data center may not be the best option.

According to an MCPc blog article entitled “Why Modular Datacenter Design?”, modularity in electrical design can be manifested as, for example, modular UPS units and modular PDUs. In the case of the data center’s UPS system, a single large configuration designed to meet foreseeable needs is not necessary; instead, UPS modules can be added to build capacity in accordance with the needs of the business, and these modules also provide additional flexibility with regard to their locations within the data center. The article cites two specific advantages of a modular approach to UPS systems: first, UPS modules can be located close to the IT equipment that relies on them, meaning less wiring and other installation expenses; second, additional modules can be easily installed to add redundancy. Modular PDUs (power distribution units) allow installation of the units in the cabinets that rely on them; this also reduces wiring and labor costs. The use of modular UPS systems and PDUs are just two aspects of modular electrical design, which can be of tremendous benefit to companies in terms of initial capital expenditure, ongoing operational expenses, and planning for new data centers (or even, in some cases, data center expansions).

A recent example of modularity in data center design is HP’s newly announced Flexible Data Center, which, according to the company, “cut capital investment requirements for the design and build of data centers in half.” Furthermore, the company stated in its recent press release that it “offers a standardized, modular approach to designing and building data centers that allows clients to replace traditional data center designs with a flexible solution that can be expanded as needed while conserving resources.”

Author contact: jclark@datacenterjournal.com

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