Tuesday, May 19, 2009

The Generation 4.0 of Data Centers

Hey everybody,
Just a quick post today – I recently found this blog site, which reveals how Microsoft are designing their Generation 4.0 data centers – This is definitely worth a read over if you are interested in latest data center design concepts and ideas:
http://blogs.technet.com/msdatacenters/default.aspx

I found this interesting excerpt from Part 1 of Designing Generation 4.0 Data Centers: The Engineers’ Approach to Solving Business Challenges – Written by Daniel Costello (Director for Data Center Services GFS).

“Perhaps most importantly, with Generation 4 we can quickly add capacity incrementally in response to demand. Gone are the days when we had to wait 12-18 months for a large data center to be built, only to use a small portion of its capacity while we waited for demand to catch up to capacity.”

I have been reading more and more about standard ‘pod’ style architecture, which is what Daniel is referring to. The Pod architecture seems to be the common theme with G4 Data Centers – The concept is you have your pod of racks which are designed to a set standard, including your power, networking, rack build-out with the servers, cabling and cooling. The idea is that if you need more computing power, you simply stamp out another pod with minimal effort and you then have a standardized environment which can grow very easily. Couple the pod architecture along with the containerized concept
I blogged about previously, and you then have a very flexible grow as you need data center.

Hope you are all well – I’ll be back soon with my next post on Cloud Computing.

Regards,
Phil P