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At first glance, The Art of the Data Center: A Look Inside the World's Most Innovative and Compelling Computing Environments appears like a standard coffee table book with some great visuals and photos of various data centers throughout the world. Once you get a few pages into the book, you see it is indeed not a light-read coffee table book, rather an insightful book where some of the brightest minds in the industry share their insights on data center design and construction.
The book takes a holistic view of how world-class data centers are designed and built. Many of the designers were able to start with a greenfield approach without any constraints; while others were limited by physical restrictions.
Author Douglas Alger is a data center architect at Cisco (Cisco is highlighted in the book in chapter 6) and has reached out to his peers at 17 other firms to share their insights. While Alger’s his other two books Grow a Greener Data Center and Build the Best Data Center Facility for Your Business were much more technical, this is more of a middle-ground title.
Some of the firms profiled in the book are Citi, Digital Realty Trust (who run the world’s largest data center in Chicago), eBay, Facebook, IBM, Intel and Yahoo!.
One of the interesting things about hearing 18 different viewpoints, both from the US and Europe-based firms, is that it shows there is not just one way to build a data center. Fundamental data center components such as raised floors are reconsidered in some of the data centers in the book. From UPS, to cooling systems and more, Alger details how the nuances of various data centers have influenced their design.
It is an unfortunate reality that many expensive data center builds and expansions fail.Read more ›
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Author Douglas Alger interviewed key managers and leaders at eighteen data centers in the United States, Canada, and Europe to learn about how their data centers were developed and managed.
Alger spotlights these eighteen data centers with photographs, essential details, a few background paragraphs, and interview questions and answers. The photographs highlight the architectural details, as well as the layouts of the data centers. They also show some of the equipment that supports the data centers, such as generators and environmental control equipment. Essential details include the name of the organization, location, when it went online, notable features, time to design and build, size, power, tier (if applicable), cabinet locations, power density, infrastructure delivery, structural loading, and fire suppression system.
The bulk of the book consists of the interviews with key personnel. Alger asks questions that get at important design elements and how decisions were made. He addresses green efforts, cooling techniques, energy sources, the use of virtualization, challenges, and what developers would do differently. Many of the data centers that he showcases are LEED certified. Some of the buildings were retrofitted and others were built to specification. One data center is housed in a former church; another is inside a former particle accelerator. Some of the data centers are fairly small, and others are quite large. Power sources range from natural gas to wind to solar. Some are single tenant data center, and others are multi-tenant. I was impressed with the variety of approaches to all of the key design features.Read more ›
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Even if you aren't a data center geek there is still some great stories here. Through a series of interviews, you are taken on a tour of some of the world's most unique data centers, from an underground former nuclear bunker in downtown Stockholm to ones that are solar and geothermal powered. There are discussions about the ways that the data center can leverage the local climate to save on cooling and how Facebook builds its computers to its own specs, squeezing every bit of efficiency out of them.
Compared to the hatch job of a recent series of New York Times feature articles, this is a book well worth reading and full of insights and innovative ways that will influence the next decade's worth of data center designs.
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Pros: captures the beauty of these "factories" of the information age; great green sensitivity Cons: the format is a little thin so the 18 cases sort of run together, might benefit from a little inducyive, theory, abstraction across the cases For: a wide range of people interested in the physical (as opposed to the data, or virtual) aspects of a data center
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I have over 20 years of IT experience working in data centers. This is an awesome book that provides great in-sight into places that are normally not available to the 'average guy'.
Technically - this book is great and full of educational content.
But lets talk about the pictures - this is a coffee table book for me as well. Its a beautiful book and I hope my non-IT friends enjoy reading it as much as I do.
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