Running HPC/HDC Operations increases customer ROI

Part I – Overview

Running a high density data center can be a real challenge. At Colocube, we’ve embraced that challenge and created attractive pricing options to address the needs of customers that want to consolidate their equipment as they are down-sizing or looking to out source their IT requirements.

Most data centers are challenged by watts per square foot or the amount of kilowatts that can be cooled in a given rack. Most data center managers aren’t thinking about creative ways to extend existing cooling infrastructure and instead are focused on trying to extract the maximum amount of footage rented to customers, which in a down economic environment is a real disadvantage to the same SME and SMB businesses trying to  squeeze every last bit out of their available dollars.

At Colocube, we are focused on providing dense (10kw per rack +) solutions that reduce our customer’s required footprint, which translates into direct savings for our customers as well as allowing us to better leverage our different data center floor space plans.  It continually amazes me that companies we bid against for projects still insist on charging customers for 2kw-6kw floor space at the same rates that we quote 10kw space. In some deals we run into, we are as much as 60% smaller in terms of overall foot print size compared to other bidders which allows us to pass those savings directly back to the customer.

What’s been really fun to engineer for customers is a product we’ve developed called an ice cube. The ice cube product allows scaling our customers up to the 30kw/rack level where blade servers are being used in super dense rack configuration, with 60-80 blades per rack. We also can use this same product to scale a rack full of dual CPU, Quad Core boxes where customers are easily able to fit 36 servers in a single rack running at 14.4kw (36 servers * 400w/server).

We also fit the ice cube for customers that are running SAN equipment that can reach easily 2kw/SAN in a 4U SAN. These SANS can then be stacked 10 SANS to a physical rack, giving a 20kw footprint and really maximizing the Terabyte per rack foot print. In some cases, where customers are employing 1TB drives in SANS that handle 48 drives/SAN, this enables our customers to realize 48 TB/SAN or nearly half a petabyte (480 Terabytes) in a single rack. Talk about neat !

In later posts, I’ll go further into details about how power and cooling works inside our facilities for dense solutions. While Colocube does provide standard collocation services for customers, it’s our ability to help customers maximize their footprint that has really propelled us forward and made our solutions the natural choice for customers that need to scale down footprint at the rack level while scaling up density inside the rack for a great ROI.