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MICRO DATA CENTRES
"The biggest capital expense advantage that
micro data centres have over the traditional
approach is that they can typically run off a
building’s existing physical infrastructure"
of processing capacity in house. Reasons for this may
include security concerns, or the need to operate a legacy
application internally. Micro data centres fit the bill perfectly
as they can be installed in spare office space, making use
of existing power and switching gear while freeing up much
building capacity for other purposes.
Drivers of micro data centres
We’ve also identified three technological developments
that enable micro data centres, which include ongoing
miniaturisation of equipment, hyperconvergence of IT
systems, and virtualisation. Silicon-based components
continue to increase in complexity and performance for a
given amount of space, as does the storage capacity of disk
drives especially with the advent of solid-state drives. In
round terms, a single rack of servers in 2016 could process
the same IT workload as 13 racks of servers eight years ago.
Hyperconverged IT refers to the integration of compute,
storage, and networking resources into a single chassis.
When all these parts are integrated into a single solution,
sometimes including the software, you improve the speed
of deployment for the micro data centre. Along with this
physical compaction, the growth of virtualisation allows
administrators to harness all of that compute power across
various workloads. Virtualisation of servers, storage and
networking allows geographically distributed
micro data centres to appear as a
single physical data centre.
One of the benefits of micro
data centres is that several can
be combined to produce an
IT resource of similar size and
complexity to that of a purpose-
built data centre. There comes a point when the trade-off
between building a data centre in the traditional manner,
and scaling up prefabricated units to meet increasing load
demands has to be considered with all of the pertinent costs
and benefits carefully analysed. Fortunately, there are tools
allowing management to carry out such analysis to ensure
that they make the most appropriate investment for their
particular needs.
Cost savings
The biggest capital expense advantage that micro data
centres have over the traditional approach is that they can
typically run off a building’s existing physical infrastructure.
In many cases, existing buildings have sufficient spare
power capacity to support a micro data centre from both
utility and emergency generator power. This allows micro
data centres to exploit the sunk costs not only in power, but
also in cooling equipment such as chillers and in core and
shell construction. There may also be tax benefits in using
micro data centres as they can be considered as business
equipment rather than a building improvement, and can
therefore be depreciated over a shorter time span.
The traditional data centre comprised 200 racks of 5kW
power rating each, whereas the micro approach comprised
200 individual micro data centre units, each comprising a
single 5kW rack. Each approach used 1N power and cooling
redundancy, had its own physical security facilities and
fire suppression. The traditional data centre used hot aisle
containment whereas each micro data centre was fully
contained front and rear.
Core and shell building costs for the traditional data
centre were estimated at $1615 per square metre. In the
case of the micro data centre approach, this cost was zero
as each data centre was making use of the sunk costs of the
facility in which it was located.
The traditional data centre had a total UPS capacity of
1.2MW using a double conversion online technology. The
total UPS capacity needed using the micro data centre
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