Energy Efficient Datacenters - The Role of Modularity in Datacenter Design

Dean Nelson

Dean is the Senior Director of Global Lab & Datacenter Design Services (GDS) in the Workplace Resources business unit of Sun Microsystems. The GDS organization bridges the gap between Facilities and IT/Engineering and is currently managing more than USD $250 million in datacenter design and construction activity. The GDS work supports the Act portion of Sun's Eco Strategy, and was showcased at Sun's Eco Launch in August 2007.

Michael Ryan

Mike Ryan is a Staff Engineer in Sun's Global Lab & Datacenter Design Services organization. Mike graduated from San Jose State University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He is a licensed professional mechanical engineer and has been involved in the design, construction, and operation of mission-critical facilities for the past 18 years. His experience spans numerous industries such as gas turbine co-generation, semi-conductor manufacturing, and mission-critical datacenters. For the last seven years he has focused on the design and operation of mechanical and electrical infrastructure systems supporting high-availability datacenters. mike joined Sun as a Staff Engineer for the GDS organization in March of 2006. Mike is the primary author of the GDS physical standards and was the lead design engineer for the Santa Clara, California datacenter project, one of the largest and most complex in Sun's history. Mike's design work supports the Act portion of Sun's Eco strategy, and was showcased at Sun's Eco Launch in August 2007.

Serena DeVito

Serena DeVito is a Datacenter Design Engineer in Sun's Global Lab & Datacenter Design Services organization. Serena joined Sun over ten years ago and has spent the bulk of her career as a system administrator within the IT organization where she designed, deployed, and supported critical infrastructure for the company. She then moved to the Software organization and managed the beta testing project for the Sun Cluster product group. Serena acted in a customer capacity running early releases of Sun Cluster software on production home directory clusters with over one-hundred active users as well as clustered web services. Serena identified, documents, and filed bugs while supporting one of Sun's largest and most complex engineering lab environments.

Ramesh KV

Ramesh has been in the technology industry for over thirteen years and has held a variety of technical & managerial roles since joining Sun in 2001. In 2007 Ramesh became a Regional Work Place Manager (RWPM) covering South Asia and India in addition to his GDS responsibilities. In this role he has been responsible for all WR activities across South Asia and India, including portfolio management, real estate services, and facilities management. Ramesh has been a critical member of the GDS technology team since 2004 and has designed multiple labs and datacenters across the Asia Pacific. Ramesh is the recipient of the PC Quest IT Implementation project of the year award in 2007 and has received twelve internal awards globally including Sun's Leadership Award in 2005.

Petr Vlasaty

Petr is a Datacenter Architect and the GDS Technical Infrastructure Lead for the EMEA region. Petr has been working in the IT industry for more than 12 years. In November 2004, Petr joined the Sun Software organization as R&D Datacenter Manager and Team Lead for the Prague Datacenter Management Team. Petr designed and implemented two internal datacenter projects in Prague in partnership with the GDS team. He applied the GDS processes and standards for the new Prague datacenter expansion that was completed in June 2006. Due to Petr's outstanding performance in Prague, he was assigned as the technical lead for the Louisville, Colorado consolidation project in August of 2006. He spent four months in Colorado developing the very detailed and complex plan. Petr joined the GDS organization full time in January of 2007. He is responsible for the Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA) region and continues to act as technical lead for the Colorado datacenter consolidation project, the largest and most complex in Sun's history.

Brett Rucker

Brett Rucker is a Staff Engineer in Sun's Global Lab & Datacenter Design Services organization where he focuses on physical environment issues. Brett has been in the 52 Summary Sun Microsystems, Inc. Corporate Engineering, Construction and Management business for 25 Years. A Graduate of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a licensed Professional Engineer, Brett began his career with Ball Aerospace Systems Division, a rich opportunity that gave him complete design and management responsibility for all construction projects. He supervised products including building additions, clean rooms, X-Ray rooms, datacenters, laboratories, anechoic chambers, secure areas, gallium arsenide facilities, high elevation satellite dish structural mounts, RF shielded rooms, and office, conference, and customer show areas.

Brian Day

Brian Day is a Senior Program Manager in Sun's Global Lab & Datacenter Design Services organization. Brian has been working in the technology industry for over 10 years, of which more than five have been with Sun. He spent over two years in Sun's Systems group, developing automation programs for server, storage, and software QA functions. Brian left Sun in 2000 to pursue his MBA full time. He joined Adobe Systems in 2001 as a Program Manager, leading the development of several Digital Imaging plug-ins for Adobe Acrobat. Brian returned to Sun in early 2005 to program manage the GDS initiative. As Senior Program Manager & Chief of Staff for GDS, Brian is responsible for first engagement with new customers, ensuring world-wide GDS projects are resourced, deliverable expectations are set, and commitments honored.

The authors would like to thank Steve Gaede, an independent technical writer and engineer, for his probing questions, deep insights, and ability to create a coherent story. Steve is a frequent contributor to Sun Microsystems technical documents, including many Sun BluePrints articles. He is a member of ACM and USENIX, and is active in the Boulder, Colorado professional community, having been a coordinator of the Front Page UNIX Users Group since 1984.

Thanks to the Sun MD team members who spent time contributing to this paper, including Maurice Cloutier, Liz From, Brian Kowalski, and Bob Schilmoeller.

The authors would also like to thank the following Sun contributors for the helpful and thoughtful comments they provided while reviewing this paper: Phil Morris, James Monahan, Rob Snevely, Steve Evans, Tracy Shintaku, and Peter Spence.