RACKS AND ENCLOSURES
Applying lessons from larger facilities Enclosures in Small Data Centres By Barry Maidment, IT Product Manager, Rittal
Introduction Power, heat and efficiency are always popular topics when reading any IT publication. The infrastructure market is bustling for position for who has the best solution to deal with these issues. Statements like ‘Blade Centre Friendly’, ‘Reduce your carbon foot print’ or even ‘40kW plus of heat extraction’ are commonplace. With so much discussion about these issues, how can IT managers determine the best solution for their next data centre roll out?
Barry Maidment shares lessons for the smaller computer room.
Here to Help For the IT manager, who works at these extremes of the data centre world, there is no simple answer, but there are plenty of people who are experts
in this field, willing to help specify the right technology. The criteria primarily come down to looking at the application and matching the right solution to meet the needs now and into the future. Therefore, success of the implementation is really down to the skill of the chosen company to partner with and their ability to interpret any needs.
Observing how larger data centres
deal with extremities can help smaller IT managers to make working in normal environments a lot more efficient or even, to some degree, future- proof. We will probably never put 30kW of heat into a small computer room, but looking at the change in rack design to allow us to handle this power will make our smaller designs more efficient.
Size Matters In some ways, more thought has to be given to a single cabinet than to a larger installation due to a mixing of different IT topologies, i.e. servers, switches, fibre, copper and even storage. Within the same cabinet these technologies can adversely affect each other. So what can we learn from working with extremes? Size is everything, contrary to what
everyone says, as it directly relates to the type of equipment being installed. For server applications, the trend in large data centres is for a minimum of 1000mm deep, with a preferred depth of 1200mm. Although servers generally do not exceed the 800mm deep footprint, it is always recommended to have a space between the back of the server and the rear door. This provides a hot air void away from the server for the heat to rise and a channel at the back of the rack for the power strips to be located. Why are the data centres pushing
for a depth of 1200mm? First, if filling the enclosure up with servers, there is a greater need to use more space at the rear of the cabinet to support the power modules. So why so much space? Potentially it is possible to put 42 1U servers within an enclosure, with each server having an A and B feed, requiring up to 84 sockets. The second reason is that data centre managers need to maximise their return on investment. With a design life of 10 years and an expected server refresh time of about 3-5 years, having the extra 200mm at the back of the rack enables the data centre manager to have peace of mind that whatever make of server is installed in the future, it will fit within their existing infrastructure and therefore future-proof the overall installation. Typically on the server side we are
seeing 600mm as the dominant width, but 800mm is now on the increase, becoming more popular simply because of the space the IT manager can use. If 1200mm deep is not possible, an 800mm wide x 1000mm deep enclosure will be the choice, therefore utilising the additional width to support power strips etc.
Size also matters when looking at the Data centre managers are asking for local and remote monitoring. 10 NETCOMMS europe Volume III Issue 3 2013
patching/cabling cabinet. The most important issue with patching enclosures is maintaining the bend radius of the
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