What is Data Center Infrastructure? – Data Center Fundamentals

[Music] all right welcome to hockey podcast 33 we're continuing our data center fundamentals series this is our fourth one today we're talking about data center infrastructure david so all of the things that make a data center what it is yes so if i were to ask you in one simple short phrase what is data center infrastructure uh all of the components that make the data no i mean this is the brilliant answer yeah i know this is the um you know the electrical the mechanical systems that you know allow data centers to function properly and we'll talk about it here in a little bit of how those have changed but if you're starting in the industry and this goes back to our intro to our data center fundamentals course that you can get online you know these are the things you need to understand at a high level to unders to to grasp how data centers function so that you can you know see why the industry is moving around you know things like data center design and why these things are changing you know data center um like facility size all these things that come into the envelope of a data center are part of the infrastructure great so you know when we were talking about this the other day you said you like to think of this from an outside in approach i do so i think yes starting with i mean the extreme outside yeah starting with you're at the street view of data center yeah right there what's going to be different than you know a different type of facility an office building a retail building like what are we going to see right off yeah uh yeah i mean you'll typically see and this is we i think we've talked about this before and it's not really within the infrastructure side but you will see some sort of security perimeter security like before you get to the building but i think actually one of the interesting um as we kind of work outside in you know when i started in like the real estate space one of the things that drew me to the data center industry was the amount of capital that it takes to to build a data center because of the the expense in the infrastructure and you know if you take the data center facility that's a hundred thousand square feet and compare that to an office building it's traditionally like 10 times more expensive to build that data center building than it is the office side and so it's it's a facet that's what makes the data center industry really interesting is it's a smaller commercial real estate market but it's so much more it's there's so much more money in it um so uh you know you'll typically see the security and then as you um you know kind of work your way in the first thing you really have to come to grips with is the power infrastructure and that is what you know companies when they are leasing data center infrastructure from a uh from a data center operator when they are building this themselves it is the need for power to support their servers that they have to figure out what to do with and so this is you know this is in essence what makes these buildings so expensive is you got to figure out from a power perspective you know how to bring that power to the building and that's typically from like transmission lines on the outside to substations substations to transformers transformers then to you know utility power coming into the building and then that will bring you into things like the ups systems um you know there's backup generators that support uh the power systems within a building so if the power goes out the generators will come on and support the building even if uh they don't yes i've been yeah no you're great so dave you know i think just a great way to that i understand this is like you think of it like a laptop like i've got here where you've got you plug something into the wall there's that little box which changes the type of power either from sure 120 volts whatever's coming out of the wall to something that your laptop can use and then subsequently you've got a battery in here as well so if that power gets disconnected yep it's going to automatically switch over it's the same thing that happens in a data center like you've got power at some voltage and amperage rating that comes from the utility comes in change it to a format that these servers can use yeah and then in addition to that everything that's set up that if that power for whatever reason fails and sometimes they've got multiple of those yeah or two of those and if any of those fail there's an immediate cut over to either battery or generator or whatever and they're all set up for like certain loads and certain amounts of time yeah and it's not so that there's always power to the server yeah and it's broken down basically from big to small so that it can serve what you know it's essentially what you do in your home too you know your power comes into the city at x and it just gets broken down so that you can use it at your home and so that's what's happening from a data center perspective one of the things that makes it so capital intensive is the redundancies that are placed which you mentioned and you know i would tell you if you if you've been in the industry if you're listening this you've been in the industry for a long time i think you would agree that redundancy the importance of that has changed over time uh you know ten years ago you would hear the term like tier four data centers uh you know there's a tier ranking typically tier one is your your lowest redundant data center all the way up to tier four um and tier four is your highest redundant data center so there's a long long period of time where companies are really trying to build those tier four data centers most expensive most redundant and then they realize that you know we can really get by with like tier three that a tier three redundant data center from a power perspective from a cooling perspective which we'll get to really satisfies our need for redundancy but it is that infrastructure that is so expensive and and really understanding how to to build that and to deliver it in a timely manner is what's changed the market the last several years yeah you touched on something that's interesting like like at the at a data center operators core business they are providing for you a secure space with reliable power and reliable connectivity right yeah and so you know jumping back to you know the physical security of a building talk a little bit more about some of the measures that these companies put in place and why they're there as far as why do customers need that security well you know i a lot of it is perception you know the reality is there's not a lot of people breaking into data centers from a from a physical standpoint um but these are the most critical operations for companies today and you know the more important i think we'd all agree that data is becoming more important what you do with data how you use it your company's internal data is like as our world grows technology grows that's becoming more and more valuable more important so you know the levels of authentication to get into an actual you know area where servers are kept and the it infrastructure is running you know typically it'll take like seven checkpoints to get in you know outside security inside security card key access biometric scanners all these different measures in place to make sure that whoever is physically in these servers rooms should should be there and that's really the point of the physical security you know one of them one of the more unique features of a data center facility is called a man trap talk a little bit about one of those are and and what happens if somebody maybe accidentally sets off an alarm and a man trap that's really funny mike uh this has happened one time in my life okay here's so essentially a man trap you know is is a is a area where you know there's a there's an entrance and an exit and you basically can't open one without the other uh well you can't open one while the other is open so basically they you know you open the door or it allows you in you're in the door shuts behind you then you can go on from you know the other area and there was a time one time about three or four years ago were you with me there or not okay where dude i thought i got the okay come on and it was a push door and i pushed it and i mean the loudest piercing noise like it's still to my soul uh i will never you know do that again yes so it worked it was an appropriate deterrent yeah and again i think you hit on it with the data piece of like is my hardest talking like a bank uh or a you know uh online retailer with credit card information they have hundreds of millions of credit cards or social security numbers or health records yes that you know that are on a server somewhere sure and you have to be able to protect yeah the sanctity of that server so i think and there's also this like cyber security piece which to be honest is a much more harder you know net to crack as it relates to making sure that you have that protected well way above the pay grade of this podcast sure and that's i mean but it exists and it's a real thing and it come and operators have to address it yeah and i think i guess what i want to make is there's probably people listening that are in the in the space that are saying hey physical security but there's also cyber security which we recognize uh but we're really just talking about the physical infrastructure from a data center perspective all right so we touched on power and anything else to talk about on the power side as far as its delivery you know any of the infrastructure the pieces that are that make up that system no it just is a you know it is it is kind of the bedrock for the data center industry and and i think if you're in the real estate business and you're trying to understand the data center space one of the very important things to realize is like it is not the space that's what is being sold it is the power it is the it is the access to the infrastructure that is what is most valuable you can put any amount of power to a degree in any amount of space as long as you can cool it yeah that's your limiting factor that's great segue down let's talk about cooling what is needed so again thinking back to the laptop analogy i think we ascribe human emotions to computers quite frequently but when your computer is thinking a lot and the little fan starts to spin and little part where your hand goes gets real hot yeah so that same thing that happens the data center it's on a much larger scale when server ramps up and it's doing its server things it generates heat yeah you got to get the heat out of there so talk about how data centers do that and why that's complex what's some different approaches that the company has taken to do that yeah and this is another part you know very important part of like the the data center infrastructure is the cooling how will you cool all the heat that you're bringing in and um you know there's a number of like different technologies and ways to approach this from just an infrastructure side you can really cool things from an uh air cooled perspective or a water cooled perspective or using air to cool things or using water to cool you know the servers and the heat or you know reject the heat in the data center and each one comes with you know more efficiencies on the front end one is more expensive than the other us so there's there's pluses and minuses to each we've seen you know companies really utilize like air cooled um the air cooled approach over the last you know five to ten years uh there are companies that still do you know water cooled systems uh but that and and that infrastructure that comes along with that uh you know typically is what takes up space you know within a data center on the outside of of like in the data center equipment yard uh yeah if you walk through any given data hall it's you'll have a an aisle do you walk down yep commonly referred to as the hot aisle yep uh or the cold aisle and then space on either side so if you look at you know ten thousand square feet of a data hall probably less than half yes physically occupied by servers the rest is airflow yeah and there's amazing i think technology or or uh innovation that's happening right now within that so that's the word i was going to use yeah the the number of ways people are trying to tackle this specific problem i think power is more or less what it is sure on the cooling side is where you see some really uh innovative word i was going to use approaches you know people putting data centers under water yeah or weird cooling configurations or putting the servers in cooled water in the facility yeah there's there's different approaches i think one of the biggest changes that has created a need for that innovation has been the very large workloads that are now being placed into multi-tenant data center facilities or single tenant data center facilities that you know a large hyperscale user would would would go to a data center operator and say hey we want to take 30 megawatts over a 5-10 year period place them in this facility and we need you to cool it and so it's the data center operator community has become much more i would say advanced and innovative in the ways they're trying to cool things one because uh there's certainly environmental benefits to doing this in a more effective way two is because a lot there's been a lot of extra cost wrapped up into a lot of this infrastructure and so if you can figure out ways to be more innovative more efficient and take some of that equipment that's not as efficient efficient out those cost savings can be passed directly to the end user and so that is what we have seen i think we'll continue to see it uh you know in the next five to ten years uh but it you know the cool you know i think about the the data center infrastructure i mean i think power i think cooling and i think connectivity so this is obviously a very key component to making sure that data centers run effectively yeah and this isn't exactly an infrastructure comment but talk about how you know when we see small retail deals like single cabinet deals typically like you know it might be like 2208 you know a little over 4kw per cabinet and so but we know that there are plenty of folks who are putting 20 30 40 kw cabinets how are what's driving that density you know because as it relates to cooling there's going to be some challenges there but what goes into the decision to to put 30kw in iraq versus 10 or 5. you know i would say philosophy like how a company wants to uh you know design their infrastructure to work effectively you know typically what we've had is like enterprise you know companies that have have built their data center i t infrastructure and then having to transition that it's really hard because you have to you know you get new systems you have to see how they work with one another you know you have to it's it can be a um a challenging approach so you know one thing is to shrink your footprint you know so like the data center operator world they want you to be more dense because they can sell more within their space the denser your cabinets are you know typically they they don't they run out of space before they run out of power so um you know if you can be more dense in your environment you typically can get a more you know sometimes a cheaper cost and you can also um you know then that the data center operator will be able to sell more in their facility so um but you know what's i mean what's driving it is typically like the maturity of an organization um you know can your the the actually it infrastructure cool up that amount of you know uh density is really the you know the biggest challenge and so you'll see a lot of like creativity as it relates to hey we're gonna put you know 500 kw in this many cabinets in this specific area of the data center we're going to use different cooling methods to do that um and that can work it just depends on you the organization and what they do and what they feel most comfortable with and would that typically be like a back and forth discussion between the customer and the data center operator say we need here's what our requirements are we think we can make it happen and then can you make make that work for us in this space yeah absolutely like if you're a co-location user and you're going into a data center for the first time there is you know you're going to work with their sales operational team or their engineers to make sure that your it infrastructure matches their ability to cool what it is that you need to to do effectively so uh you know you've got to communicate with them and that's what i've talked about before you can see some of our other content but it's like you have to pick a partner or someone that you really feel like you can work well with because you will be working with them and the idea that like you're just gonna put your infrastructure in a space and and be done is that's just not how it works so you know there's there's certainly communication back and forth on here's our plan um there's what's called cfd modeling computational flow dynamics that show how the space is intended to work and so the data center operator will say hey what do you have they'll basically sketch that out for you and then show you how they'll bring the air in and out to make sure that the the environment is cooled appropriately so all right so last piece is on the connectivity side so it can be great have all the power in the world totally reliable it's cooled but if you can't get the information out what good is it so talk about the connectivity piece and how that works from a redundancy standpoint or from infrastructure yeah within the facility yeah you bet typically like fiber is you know how that information is you know carried in and out of a data center facility and you have multiple fiber providers coming into a data center facility depending on where the site is located within the city might determine how many providers are actually coming in and uh and so typically you'll have two places within a data center facility where those uh data center or where those five providers are coming into the building itself and those are called meet me rooms and or mmrs so the data center world loves acronyms so there's one for you uh cfd i gave you another one that's two today i'm sure we'll get to a few more before the end of this but uh and then typically you will connect with the fiber provider if you're a user based on you know who's in the building and and then that fiber will be run from that meet me room to your actual you know cage location or data hall or whatever it is so um that's how the infrastructure works like stepping back that has become a much more important part of the data center industry over the last several years you can if you want evidence of that look at the value of the carrier hotel which is located you know strategically in different uh areas like one or two per city and that's where like almost all the connectivity comes to and that just speaks to the richness of you know these ecosystems that are formed when not just fiber providers but cloud providers and you know different network and peering areas are created and the more connectivity that is available there uh you know the better it is for different organizations so you know that that is a very important piece of things moving forward and you know i i think it will continue to be like the rest of this year three years from now five years from now especially as like companies are looking to be more sophisticated with their it infrastructure and how that serves their business today and talk about like the the different types of fiber that company might need they might there are different types of fiber for different uses that they would need to have multiple kinds not just from a redundancy standpoint in case one goes out but to optimize different workloads that they're doing yeah i mean some could be i mean some just have to do with like i mean mostly it has to do with how much you know bandwidth you would need to serve certain types of applications it probably depends on you know seasonal spikes in traffic so if you're thinking of if your retail provider and you you know see traffic go up in november and december there might be allocations needed to be made to meet those requirements you know the financial industry is another good um example of this if you're thinking of like launching an online banking system that needs to be spread out to different users you know how you connected them and how they connect to your platform is i mean it's key you know uh um we both have kids they love to play fortnite and other games and so any type of uh you know connectivity issues that that application has to the you to the end user which in this case is our kids uh you know their patience level is about this and so you know companies like that are going hey we have to meet the expectations of our users and um and so you know those are a couple of examples but it's it's real time it makes sense when you kind of step back and think about like oh yeah man you know the more i see the the wheel of death on a youtube video or whatever i go i don't want to watch that anymore and so i'm going to be done with it you know it's funny when you start up fortnite i know you haven't played yet i've i have not but i've watched yes when it it has a little logo and it's like checking your connection where are you going this is checking connection to data centers it says right there i was like that's fascinating that's right that's what we do yeah so like part of that yeah so i think the the the key here is if you're listening you know really understanding the connectivity aspect of data center facility is really important and it's not just you know the number of fiber providers coming in but it is things like the redundancy you know how many providers are in a building a lot of end users will have one or two relationships with different fiber providers and that will be the key driver for their decision like hey we we use this fire provider in four locations and so we need to make sure that they're in this so so you might have to understand how far that fiber provider is to that data center facility because they're going to need to be there by the time the end user gets there themselves all right so one of the concepts that's a law it's a it's a big point for data centers is the concept of redundancy so redundancy is not a binary concept so talk a little bit about redundancy you talked earlier about tier ratings yeah and how those are related um you know specifically around the concept of like n plus one or two and plus one so talk about what that means and why does it matter yes when i for when i this is like 2009 gosh and i was working on a this is back when i was doing actually like brokerage for for the for a data center client um and you know i had to fill out this spreadsheet so i had to look facility by facility and one of the words was like redundancy i don't know anything man i don't know kilowatt megawatt i think we've talked about this before but one thing was redundancy and i was just basically copy and pasting what the thing said and so it was like you know mechanic or electrical redundancy you know at the ups like 2n and then it was you know cooling redundancy n plus one and and so it took a while for it to click but you know basically so if it if it seems foreign you know that there's a reason back to ninth grade algebra sure eighth grade algebra or whatever that was yes so it's just very strange but basically yeah the the n stands for basically like the need the original need of what you what it is to support the requirement um and so then as you start to layer on like n plus one you know that is basically you would have a backup behind the need so you may have five generators required to power this facility if it goes down yeah if you're an n plus one configuration you've got a sixth one yes and the assumption then is that probably not all five of these are going to go out at once right maybe probably one of them likely will go out and we've got a backup over here to handle it yes now at two in you would go ahead two times five is ten that's right you would have ten so you'd have the five that are serving and then each one of those would have one behind and so so this is so that cost costs money and so you know typically the two in facilities like that cost gets passed to the end user so if you're you know it's it's i wouldn't call it an amenity but it almost is because it's just something that hey we'll we'll put it in there for you if you want but you're going to pay for it and so what the data center user came back to the provider five seven years ago and says like hey that's great and all but like we don't need that and so we're not going to pay for it so if you want to keep building it that's great but that does no that no longer serves the needs that we have and if you look at like if you listen to some of our other content we are talking about how the building is changing the data center operators are building today it's no longer one story it's two it's three it's four uh you know the data center um redundancy requirements now are no longer two in at the at the electrical level they're more of like n plus one uh n plus one at the cooling side of things and the technology is getting better and better more efficient more efficient and those cost savings are getting passed to the end user and that's that's been this process of the enterprise and the hyper skill world trying to figure out what they need going to people going to people that build it and saying this is what we need can you do it for cheaper and can you do it more efficiently it's not just cheaper but more efficiently and that is what we've seen and because the data center operator world has changed that's what's grown the market so if you look at our statistics from 2015 to today you've seen the market grown you you look at that commission power number and it goes in you know dallas from 200 megawatts to 350 in northern virginia from i don't know 600 megawatts to whatever it is now 1.2 gigawatts the reason why is because of what i just described and and that's only continuing to grow yeah i think you hit on it like this is true in any industry that uh providers or vendors or you whatever it is people who are serving the market are going to try and get more and more efficient even if their customers weren't demanding which in this case they are they're trying to maximize their profit so it makes a lot of sense uh that there's going to find there's going to be a continued optimization yeah of those efforts yeah and so as we've seen you know it's generally trended in that m plus one region yeah so and the market's gotten more competitive you've got more players you've got there's a lot of smart people in our space one thing's like when people come out with new technology or something's going to change things significantly you know i'm normally a bit skeptical because we have some very smart people from an engineering perspective that are building that are you know and they've done this for a long time and so um so i always think you know and they're looking to change things at this point almost on like the micro level that'll have some big macro changes moving forward so it's you know from an infrastructure standpoint this is one of those things that you have to understand at a high level because this controls the capital and the money behind you know if you're investing in the space you know you want to have a good rough understanding of this because this is why your investments will be much more expensive on the data center side than on the office or the industrial or the retailer or whatever it is that you do you know you made me think of one more bonus question man that's that's great i love buying ue yeah i see that another acronym for you yes tell me what it means yeah and why is it important yeah it's it's a it's a as mike mentioned an acronym power usage effectiveness this measures the efficiency of the air con the efficiency of the cooling in a in a facility so when we i i would tell you today this is your the number here is less important than it was five ten years ago i'm gonna explain um the you know ten years ago data centers were probably in like the one point seven 1.8 1.9 range which means they weren't they weren't efficient so but tell me what how that number is actually yeah so it's cooling up it's taking a lot more um infrastructure and energy to cool the entire facility than just like the raised floor so you're just being you're being inefficient today pues are in the 1.1 1.2 um this is a measure of of all the power that's required to run the facility how much is you know powering the servers versus powering the correct yes and so um and so this is just a very you know just looking at that efficiency number so from that standpoint i would say that um as data center construction and facility operations has improved you know that number has become more consistent among more people so they've kind of figured the industry has figured out hey if we do x y and z we can get the most efficient data center um you know power perspective and so that that's what we've seen um over the last i would say three to five years so you you are seeing like new facilities a day you know they're going to be when they are fully commissioned and and you know fully uh leased or uh occupied you know they'll be in that one point one to 1.4 number and that's pretty healthy and as an end user you know it's important to note that that's that's going to be a cost they're going to bear yeah right because they're paying typically for actually the capacity that they're renting sure plus the actual energy that they're using yeah so you know 1.7 and 1.4 is huge yeah or 1.3 the difference between 1.2 and 1.18 not as much but if you're a large user if you've got 10 megawatts of space yeah you know that could be very could have a huge impact on your bottom line yeah the the you know i think if you're a really small user what this matters to you is just kind of like hey what type of part what type of provider am i working with how important is facility operations in them efficiency kind of at a higher level because to your point the cost the differences aren't that crucial to them as you talk about you know the bigger your requirement is the more those things impact you know because it's direct cost past passed to you and make no mistake about it this is a cost that the tenant will pay uh over time all right dave well thank you so much for all of your insights on data center infrastructure so if uh we said this before you can get this information all through our blog just go to datacenterhawk.com blog and then there's a drop down for fundamentals and that's all that content there you can also get that delivered to you via email i'm sure there's a sign up that's very apparent if austin has done his job well which i know he has on the site um or just stay tuned for this more of this content to come out in a video format [Music] you

Channel: datacenterHawk

Views: 36,918

Rating: 4.900208 out of 5

Keywords: data center, data centers, data center fundamentals, infrastructure, colocation, data center technician, colocation data center, data centre infrastructure, data center infrastructure, data center infrastructure management, data center infrastructure design, data center infrastructure manager, data center physical infrastructure, redundant data center

Id: FD5cf7uZDhg

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020