TechWise TV Tours Cisco's Allen, Texas Data Center

Last week Cisco released a really nice TechWise TV tour of their new Allen, Texas data center. First of all - Kudos to Cisco for explaining this level of detail about their new designs. Although much of what they showcase as cutting edge design methods are just that - they are things I've seen recently pop up in a number of other presentations about new data centers being built by Colo's, REIT's, etc.

Extra credit to Cisco for making it a 720p video :)

I always notice the brands used within the data center, and as such, here is what I saw in their video:

• Panduit cabinet infrastructure products
• Eaton power equipment
• Omni-ID products used for RFID tracking of equipment
• Trane Chillers
• Dolphin Water Care - water treatment
• EuroDiesel

They have created this interactive tour as well to walk through the various components of the data center.

Data Center Design

As I read the Pingdom article about "8 ways to make data centers less boring"....I recalled a TED talk I watched recently. The talk was from Don Norman, and I later learned that it was a speech from 2003! Anyway, it was a Really good talk and made me think about the overall design of a data center and how it makes you feel when seeing it.

I work in the colo industry, so we have to sell the data center as a product and after listening to Don Norman I can see how design, architecture and a number of other details effect how the data center is experienced by customers and employees alike.

Even the companies making data center containers today pay attention to the outside colors, layout of racks and shiny metal curves inside. Functionality, efficiency and cost will always trump .... because utlimately the data center has a sole purpose.....but why not put the little bit of effort into the principles that Don talks about and make it even better.

Check out Don's TED Talk here

P.S.: The 2008 talk from Mike Rowe (host of Dirty Jobs) is still by FAR the best one I have seen.

Data Center and Green Design

I ran across a couple of interesting posts on CleanTechnica recently, and then a newspaper article tonight that prompted this blog post.  The CleanTechnica posts I liked were:

• UK becomes world's biggest producer of offshore wind power
• Off grid, tidal-powered data center in UK
• Alternative fuels could deplete water supplies

Then - today the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had an article on designing buildings for increased productivity.  The thing that caught my attention was the mention of the new $21 million Monsanto data center.  I imagine/hope I am reading too much into this, but.....

"...Fox aimed to limit human errors by introducing daylight into much of the space.  The firm said studies showed natural light improved the efficiency and mood of employees."

I'm all for this in the office space -- but they seemed to be talking particularly about the data center itself.  Any reader of my blog would know there are any number of security, natural disaster and other concerns with putting windows in the data center!  Anyway...the construction video is below...

IBM Data Center Modeling

I watched a video on IBM and it reminded me of some old software I used to use. Many many years ago the company I worked for used CA Unicenter for monitoring. It was pretty cool software and for the price, it ought to be. The semi-cheesy and not really useful feature it had was a 3-D fly-in view to computer hardware. Complete with really bad graphics you could fly in from your world view, all the way down to inside of a server on your network.

Anyway, the video explains that IBM is building data centers in Second Life (a virtual world) to assist planners and designers for real-world data centers. Pretty cool!

Check it out here