Oct
15
WRITTEN BY:
Greg Goode
Thursday, 15 October 2009
The ubiquitous universal form-factor shipping container: you’ve seen it transporting goods worldwide on ships, rail and by road, acting as building site offices or sheds, providing temporary and permanent housing, and even providing walls. Well, now it has entered the data centre industry construct—not only delivering a hermitically-sealed concentrated data hall for information technology, but also in providing the necessary facility infrastructure of power and cooling.
The Lunar Module ‘Eagle’ landed on the moon on 20 July 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission, but in 2009, the data centre in a container (DCIC) and its side-kick, the data centre energy in a container (DCEC), have well and truly landed in the data centre industry’s backyard. Are we seeing ‘data centre space junk’? (I think I’ve just coined a phrase!) Is it an alien encounter? (‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.’ Star Trek fans may relate to this one.) Or is it just ‘same-same, but different’? (Travellers to Asia may have heard this when buying goods.)
There are now more than a dozen companies fabricating specific products (and no doubt companies providing one-offs) to deliver the containerised data hall IT infrastructure, and a number offering the facility infrastructure in a container. Is the data centre industry embracing this delivery model with gusto? It’s hard to tell.
A recent announcement in
DatacenterDynamics FOCUS e-news, highlights that the
US company Active Power has entered the latter market with its PowerHouse™ system. Such stories pop up now and then but, overall, figures are scant. I doubt any vendor is going to release such information holus-bolus as it immediately alerts competitors to the product’s success (or lack of) and, more importantly, industry users are alerted to its acceptance. If the uptake is low then industry users may get the wrong impression, without really looking behind the figure and understanding the reasons.
The universal form-factor shipping container ain’t sexy. It looks industrial, and a casual data centre user looking upon this lump of metal is not exactly struck with a sense of permanency or security when thinking of the IT assets it has to house and support. It has the feeling of being temporary. How does a risk analyst or insurer look upon a corporate enterprise housing their family data-jewels in such a beast? How does the data centre user perceive this beast?
While some vendors in this market have engineered pretty smart IT infrastructure into the confined space—which for a 6.1 m and 12.2 m (20 and 40 foot) container is approximately 43 m³ and 86 m³ respectively—others have taken a more traditional path and shoe-horned in standard data centre IT infrastructure plus power distribution and cooling solutions. The end result is the same and the container is the common factor.
How does the containerised data centre environment fit with the sacred text of data centre construction which is TIA-942? This document doesn’t speak of the universal form-factor shipping container in the construct. So, is this solution outside the standard? I don’t think so.
Let’s face it, what goes on in the 43 m³ or 86 m³ is pure IT and, if one thinks laterally, the container is nothing more than a data hall which can either be dropped raw into the great outdoors or into a warehouse, as practised by Google and Microsoft. It can easily meet the UPTIME® tier levels with suitable measures applied.
The data centre in a container and its side-kick, the data centre energy in a container, appear, for all intent and purpose, to be same-same, but different. Let’s not get hung-up as to whether universal form-factor shipping containers housing IT, or its energy source, are of the same taxonomy as the conventional data centre construct, or whether it even has a place in the industry. The container solutions in the market will address … are addressing industry needs, and it will be decided, in the fullness of time, as to where and when it’s used.