profiles/Carnemark 62 Q www.theregistrysf.com Jakob Carnemark senior vice president, <strong>Skanska</strong> 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 <strong>Skanska</strong> 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 <strong>Skanska</strong>’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-
63 Q www.theregistrysf.com 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
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