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Jakob Carnemark
senior vice president,
Skanska USa’s Mission Critical unit
The Data Center Grows Up
Robert Celaschi
BIG DATA MEANS BIG oPPoRTUNITY for
business and other enterprises, but it also
is giving rise to big challenges. For those in
the construction industry, talk has turned
to creating the next generation of data
center to help handle the tsunami of potentially
new intelligence.
Data is growing eight times faster than
IT spending on a yearly basis, according to
construction and engineering firm Skanska
USA. Wal-Mart alone generates a million
transaction every hour, or about 2.5 petabytes
of data. But if a company wants to
make money from all the info it gathers, data
has to do more than just sit on a hard disk.
“If you have all this data out there, but
The rise of big data plus energy and
infrastructure costs are forcing change
you can’t search it, it is not as valuable,”
said Jakob Carnemark, senior vice president
of Skanska’s Mission Critical unit,
which built large data centers for IBM in
Foster City and eBay Inc.’s data center in
Salt Lake City. “What social media companies
are doing is putting their data on servers,
so they can do very fast searches on it.”
But computing demands a lot more
electricity than simple storage. A typical
server draws about 300 watts. Put 50 of
those in a rack, and that’s 1,500 watts. Fill
a building with row after row of racks, and
total power consumption adds up fast.
Today, data centers consume about 1.3
percent of all global electricity, according
to Robert Bryce, a senior fellow with the
Center for Energy Policy and the Environment
at the Manhattan Institute writing in
The Wall Street Journal. That’s more electricity
than is used in some entire countries,
including Australia and Mexico.
When you run a lot of power through
electronic equipment, it generates heat.
Servers, on the other hand, need to stay
cool. This sets up a huge challenge for
managing data centers.
Until now, data center owners and operators
have been able to keep pace, thanks
to Moore’s Law, which holds that the number
of transistors on a computer chip will
double roughly every two years. Between
buying more efficient servers every few
years and adding more real estate, the industry
could get enough capacity to match
the growth in data.
Now the pace at which you can fit more
data in a box is slowing, and the main cost
driver for the data
center is no longer
the IT application;
it is energy and infrastructure.
The
more chips that are packed into a server, the
more energy the server uses, and the more
energy needed to cool, Carnemark said.
How is the explosion of data changing the
job of the chief informa tion officer?
CIos are no longer CIos. They are factory
managers. You have to start looking
at the outcome—what your IT initiatives
create in the way of energy footprint—and
you have to start managing those initiatives.
Companies are starting to see that
the infrastructure and energy costs are far
outstripping other operating expenses.
PUE (power usage effectiveness) is a
good metric, in the sense that it got people
talking about it. But it’s like saying your assembly
line is efficient because of its power
consumption. That doesn’t look at whether
the assembly line is doing anything useful.
What you want to measure is the useful
output and then your expenditure to get
it. PUE is good; it’s your overhead. But you
have to connect it to outcomes.
Social media companies are even recording
mouse movements on the screen,
to understand how people navigate a page.
That creates massive amounts of data.
So what should data centers look at instead
of PUE?
The absolute metric that companies
should focus on is utilization of the asset.
Most companies make a bet based on
growth rate and build data centers much
more massively than they need. Therefore,
they are always under utilizing it.
Say you build a data center for $10 million
per megawatt. Say you spend $100 million.
And then when you move in, the data
center is only partially loaded. Even if you
fill it up after five years, the average over
that five years is only 50 percent, so you are
really spending $20 million a megawatt.
What other choice does a data center
operator have?
You buy it as you buy a utility. Normally, you
build big air-handling systems that are inefficient
under partial loads. We went down
a different road to develop infrastructure
that is independent of what you are filling
up. You can deploy the system in smaller
chunks, like adding a floor to an office, as
needed, for new employees.
We have developed a modular cooling solution,
eoPTI-TRAX, that is six times more
efficient than traditional cooling structures
and up to 30 times more efficient than a traditional
chiller plant at low loads.
How?
There are three components: A hot-aisle
containment assembly; a cooling distribution
unit that takes up less space in a two-

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Jakob Carnemark photographed inside ineRTeCH, a research & development facility located in Danbury, Connecticut where the latest and greenest technology to data centers is currently available.
Adam Friedberg

end configuration, where one side can take over if another side
fails; and an external heat-rejection unit that uses 80 percent less
water than a traditional cooling tower. We are able to get the efficiency
of traditional phase change without significant uses of
electrical load.
We are not breaking any laws of thermodynamics. But we get
the efficiency of a refrigerant that has 78 more times the cooling
ability of water, which in turn is more efficient than air. Instead of
being a water-cooled system or air-cooled, it’s neither.
We focused on a developing a technology where we could have
the same overhead for cooling different loads, from 5 kilowatts to
50 kilowatts per rack. And the eoPTI-TRAX system tracks to the
environmental condition and adjusts automatically.
How does “tracking environmental conditions” differ from what data
centers call “air-side cooling,” where you essentially open the windows
and let cool air in?
Most data centers find it difficult to switch to free cooling. They
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Social media companies are even recording mouse movements
on the screen, to understand how people navigate a page.
That creates massive amounts of data.
do it only a couple of times a year, once as the winter starts, then
again six months later. They can’t do it daily. This system does.
The problem with using air is that you need good filtering, and
it is costly.
How does this go back to your point of measuring output?
If you look at the pace of IT growth, you are still going to have
more data center growth. The question is building it efficiently so
that companies can afford to continue the pace.
Right now the model is an unsupportable business model. Some
companies are moving their data centers to Finland and Sweden
to take advantage of the cooler weather. We wanted a technology
that would let people build in warmer environments and build
where there is more population density.
For the Bay Area, given that the cost drivers are energy and infrastructure,
the central point of digital infrastructure is that we
come up with ways to support those industries that allow them to
grow and flourish. Q
Prefabricated data center module that Skanska is building for national telco client TeLUS
which will soon be one of the most energy-efficient, greenest data centers in the world.
Adam Friedberg