The Art of the Data Center, by Douglas Alger

The Art of the Data Center: A Look Inside the World’s Most Innovative and Compelling Computing Environments. By Douglas Alger. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc., 2013. 360 pages. ISBN 9781587142963.

I’m marginally involved in the University Libraries’ migration to a new data center at the University at Albany, SUNY, so I was very interested in reading this book on state-of-the-art data centers. 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. Many decisions are made based on geography: whether the data center is being built in a hot or cold climate, in a disaster-prone area, and what kinds of power sources are most economical.

The weakest part of the book, for me, was the interview structure. I found it difficult reading many pages of interviews. It struck me that short quotes from interview subjects are not difficult to read, but long unedited quotes are annoying. Interview subjects repeat themselves and sometimes their sentences don’t make any sense. A statement that one might overlook in a conversation makes no sense when it’s written down. Sometimes I wasn’t sure what they were trying to say. It would have been much better if someone had heavily edited their responses, or simply asked them to respond to the questions in writing in the first place. That would still probably have needed editing, but not necessarily as much.

The data centers that Alger spotlights in this book are:

·         ACT
·         Affordable Internet Services Online
·         Bahnhof
·         Barcelona Supercomputing Center
·         Calcul Québec
·         Cisco
·         Citi
·         Digital Realty Trust
·         eBay
·         Facebook
·         Green House Data
·         IBM
·         Intel
·         IO
·         NetApp
·         Syracuse University
·         Terremark
·         Yahoo!