modularity modular data center

Today my team released an RFP for a small, but dense eBay data center design project in Phoenix Arizona.  I am really excited about this RFP for two reasons.  First, this is an ambitious project that will not only challenge the engineering and design firms but the hardware manufacturers as well.

9 months ago, I was in sunny Phoenix at the 7x24 conference.  A group of about 40 DCP end users gathered on a Sunday morning for a 5 hour brainstorming session on next generation solutions.  We discussed the Top 10 list, the stack, the current Chill Off 2 testing, modular data center design concepts and what the future could and should look like.  At the end of the session we had our updated top 10 list and a direction decided for the Chill Off 3.  The Chill Off 3 would be broken into two parts.  The first part is a highly flexible, modular, high-temp data center design that would allow solutions from today and tomorrow to snap in like legos. The infrastructure would also scale as needed rather than building out everything from day one. The second, was the compute load itself and how we could maximize performance not only in the power and cooling systems, but in the actual work being performed. We would look at the entire system performance rather than the components by themselves.  More on the compute load part in a future blog posting.