Five lessons of a datacenter overhaul

Lesson 2: Don't skimp on professional services

Work on gutting and remodeling HIG 319 resumed and we made our first official contacts with APC for power and cooling solutions and rack requirements. The information we received back took into account our square footage, the current electrical and cooling specs of the two rooms, and our intended server and rack load. APC ran all these figures through its datacenter planning tool and sent back a series of PDFs that gave us an initial floor plan, the names and model numbers of the power and cooling solutions they recommended, and a basic blueprint of every rack in the new datacenter. Initially this looked great, but later we found we'd made a critical mistake.

APC was kind enough to volunteer not only the equipment, but also manpower for the project. Understandably, the company wanted to save as much money as it could here, so our project was run using the cost-savings model rather than the full-on professional service model of APC datacenter design. The deluxe model would have required more manpower in the form of a project manager on APC's side.

For readers embarking on their own datacenter project, we can't over-recommend spending the money on full professional services consulting with a core vendor such as APC. Had we the good sense to solicit the service, UH reps say they would have tried to come up with the money somewhere, because trying to save cash by running without such help is very risky -- as we were about to find out.

Even at this early planning stage, an APC project manager would have gone over every detail in a conference call, whereas we simply received PDF-laden e-mails; he also would have given recommendations for installing the wiring, piping, and other prerequisites. Opting for the unroyal treatment, we were simply referred to a reference page on APC's Web site that showed piping specs for a variety of different cooling solutions. Left to our own devices -- and the recommendation of a UH air-conditioning engineer who misunderstood some specifications -- we made the wrong choice.

In short, there's no substitute for expert guidance. An APC project manager would have made this selection for us and simply told us what to install. The right piping would have been a no-brainer from the start, instead of a last-minute correction, and nearly a costly rip-out-and-replace exercise.

Lesson 3: Saddle a project team member with detail duty

We did get some good advice from APC on our cooling solution, though even here a consultant would have helped. APC consultant or no, it would have been a good move to assign one of our project team to detail duty. We had a project lead coordinating activity and making sure the work was getting done. But we had no one tracking those critical little details -- product specifications, order status, supporting documentation -- that set us back time and again.

The order for our cooling solution was a case in point. Originally, we'd hoped to use the building's chill-water cooling, because that's typically the most cost-effective choice for small datacenters like this one. However, the chill water capacity was already taken up cooling existing labs. We'd have to use something else. APC's product engineers put their heads together and recommended the InRow RP, a solution that uses two roof-mounted condensers matched to two APC SX rack-mounted compressors and evaporator assemblies. The InRow RP was the next-best thing to chill-water from a cost standpoint, and installation promised to be straightforward. Install the appropriate mounting brackets on the roof and run the right piping to HIG 319-319a through the pipe chase behind the room, and we'd be good to go. The best part is that the InRow solution is significantly more efficient than traditional datacenter cooling units, so we're banking on significant energy savings as well.