Bed sheets cover up widening data centre crisis

It is understood that other centres are placing chimneys over hot equipment to exhaust the hot air straight through the roof, or installing false roofs between racks to negate inadequate floor pressure.

“We see a lot of inefficient use of air-conditioning,” said Brad Ferguson, managing director of The Frame Group, a Sydney-based technology services company.

“There is no regard to the aerodynamics or airflow within the facility or even how equipment is placed into racks. We’re currently working on one [centre] in Victoria like this.”

The ‘quick fixes’ underlie what appears to be a growing trend in the data centre space – that many businesses have outgrown their buildings and aren’t sure where to turn next.

“A lot of customers are taking out short-term leases because they don’t know if the facility can handle their requirements long-term,” said Bruce McEwen, director of Galileo Connect.

“The only reason to go short-term is if you want to move, but the cost of moving a data centre is horrendous and failure isn’t an option.

“We’re seeing customers staying in older, unsuitable facilities due to the cost and dangers of moving out,” McEwen told iTnews.

Those who stay are implementing strategies such as those described above to extend the life of their buildings.

Others are playing what McEwen calls ‘hot/cold games’, referring to use of the hot/cold aisle concept to prolong the capacity of an existing centre.

This involves dividing the centre into a series of ‘hot’ aisles where racks face each other, and ‘cold’ aisles which run behind each row of racks.

Hypothetically, cold air pumped into the cold aisle is drawn through the fans in the mounted equipment on both sides of the aisle. The resulting hot air is exhausted into the adjacent aisle.

“Hot/cold design causes unnatural placement of equipment,” said McEwen.

“A very wide data hall is just an absolute basket case to manage from an airflow point of view. If you don’t have to play hot/cold games then that’s a godsend for design.”

McEwen believes the mid- to long-term resolution is that new energy efficient, flexible and upgradeable data centres need to be built and customers moved into them ‘in a planned and scheduled way’.

This modular approach to data centre engineering and design is critical because the next generation of centres need to provide a safe infrastructure environment for the next 20 to 25 years.

Read on to page 2 for an alternative strategy to cotton sheets.

“[In the early 2000s] hundreds of thousands of square metres of data centre space came up all over the world,” said McEwen.

“Whoever picked them up [from the likes of Pihana and Exodus] has been quietly filling them with computer technology, to the point where they are now occupied.

“Demand for space has caught up with us, and that community of speculative developers has disappeared – ask them to go back and sink another $500 million in data centre space and they’ll run for the hills,” McEwen explained.

Galileo Connect is part of the new breed. With financial backing from the ASX-listed property conglomerate, Thakral, it is pumping a cool $3 billion into major data centre projects in Sydney, Canberra, Singapore and Tokyo.

Each location will host a ‘campus’ of up to 10 data halls, which McEwen said will give Galileo ‘some interesting economies of scale’ that will be reflected in the cost of leasing the space.

In particular, plant and maintenance staffing costs could be around 50 per cent less. This is because Galileo is negotiating bulk discounts on plant in its build phase that would be unavailable to operators of one or two centres.

“We’re going to have a fair chop at their operating and power costs,” McEwen told iTnews.

“Because we’ll go in and buy 80 UPSs, we can negotiate a better per-unit price and also a maintenance service and replacement program over 15 to 20 years.

“We’re also telling suppliers that if there’s a problem at any time of day, we want three pre-configured replacement units in secure storage ready to go. If you try doing that for a single site, they’re [the vendor] not interested,” McEwen continued.

“In that sense, we’re redefining the industry because plant suppliers can get serious about supplying high quality resilient services [at those volumes], meaning that as landlords we get a level of resilience and service that is unheard of in today’s market.”

Galileo is currently looking for tenants to take up long-term lease positions on its yet-to-be-built properties.

The tender is out for the Sydney campus, to be built at Norwest Business Park in Baulkham Hills, in Sydney’s northwest. It is said to be worth around $200 million.

A development application has also been lodged to build a larger $800 million campus in Canberra.

The Canberra facility will utilise gas co-generation as its primary energy source, in partnership with utility ActewAGL.

The heat by-product generated will be put to use to produce chilled water services, a move that Galileo Connect expects will result in a 40 per cent decrease in electrical consumption.

“We’re looking at all our projects to see how we can get gas co-generation into them,” said Stephen Ellis, director of Galileo Connect Asia Pacific.

“You have to be in bed with the relevant utilities to do this.”

The campuses are also said to have also been engineered specifically to maximise electrical efficiency.

In Canberra, this is expected to translate to one unit of power producing one unit of computing, but requiring only 0.3 units of cooling.

This is about half the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of older data centres, McEwen said.

“Imagine telling an organisation they can reduce their electricity bill by even 20 or 25 per cent,” said McEwen.

“Now you’ve got the attention of the CFO who can look at moving the data centre as a cost saving exercise.”

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