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  THE INFO RMATION SO URCE FOR TH E DAT A CEN TER INDUS TRY EXECUTIVE GUIDE SERIES PART 6 Data Center Designs by Julius Neudorfer April 2013 This is the sixth of a six part series of our Executive Guide whitepapers: 1. Data Center: Build vs. Buy 2. T otal Cost of Ownership 3. Data Center Energy Eciency 4. Creating Data Center Strat egies with Global Scale 5. Custom Data Centers 6. Data Center Designs Brought to you by 

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  • THE INFORMATION SOURCE FOR THE DATA CENTER INDUSTRY

    EXECUTIVE GUIDE SERIES PART 6

    Data Center Designs

    by Julius NeudorferApril 2013

    This is the sixth of a six part series of our Executive Guide whitepapers:

    1. Data Center: Build vs. Buy2. Total Cost of Ownership3. Data Center Energy Efficiency4. Creating Data Center Strategies

    with Global Scale5. Custom Data Centers6. Data Center Designs

    Brought to you by

  • www.DataCenterKnowledge.com Contact: Edwin Rothrock 513-322-5616 [email protected] 2

    Data Center Designs

    This last guide in the Executive Series is not just about the nuts and bolts (uninterruptible power supplies, back-up generators and chiller plants, etc.) of the data center facility. And while they are necessary to support the IT equipment and important elements of the de-sign process, they are the enablers, not the drivers of the design process.

    If you are a denizen of the C suite (CEO, CIO, CTO, etc.) you are more likely to be concerned about meeting the challenges of facing globalized economies along with the ever increasing pressure to deliver competi-tive innovations and greater performance, yet while economically burdened to do so with less resources. You need to engage with customers by embracing mo-bile, social and big data analytics. While you will still need to rely on the experts who are intimately familiar with the inner workings that make up the data center, senior IT management must set the long term logical information systems direction that in turn drives the physical design criteria.

    Introduction

    Data Center Designs have varied widely, especially over the last several years. Originally data center designs focused primarily on reliability and availability, with little regard to energy usage or long term sustainability. As energy costs rose and operating efficiency gained more importance, a variety of technologies and designs were used in data centers that were previously not considered feasible.

    This edition of our Executive Series summarizes some of previous issues of the series which reviewed some of the major factors that play a role in the decisions involved with designing and building a data center, such as; Build vs Buy, Total Cost of Ownership and Energy Efficiency which impact the decisions that go into your organizations overall data center strategies.

    This final issue examines some of the classic design adaptations and new data center design trends needed to meet the paradigm shift of the computing current and future landscape, as businesses strive to meet the challenges driven by evolving IT architecture, Social Media, and Mobile Computing, as well as higher availability for Cloud services.

    We cannot fear change, we must embrace it or it will overwhelm us.

    As executive level IT business driven decision-makers, the demand for more creative and open thinking is a necessity, not an option. How to effectively deliver the maximum amount of services in a timely and highly competitive landscape, while doing so in the most cost efficient manner, is now a business mandate. This applies to almost every aspect of any organizations operations, and is an abso-lute necessity for todays and tomorrows data centers.

  • www.DataCenterKnowledge.com Contact: Edwin Rothrock 513-322-5616 [email protected] 3

    Data Center Designs

    Design for Evolving HardwareCurrent designs for traditional enterprise type data centers arent necessarily flexible enough for the myr-iad of newer devices coming their way. IT hardware is beginning to morph into different form factors, which may involve non-standard physical configurations, as well as unconventional cooling and power schemes. This does not nec- essarily mean that a traditional design will not work in the near future, how- ever the long term IT systems plan-ning must be eva-luated to understand the potential impact on the physical issues in the data center facility. Just as the widespread use of bladeserver technology and virtual-ization had a radical impact on the cooling systems of older data centers; other hardware and software de-velopments may also begin to influence the physical design requirements and should not be overlooked.

    The IT equipment landscape is also changing and manufacturers product lines are becoming more en-compassing and fluid. Major competing vendors are crossing traditional boundaries and the lines of sepa-ration of Server, Storage and Network are becoming blended and blurred. This can potentially impact the layout and location of equipment (rather than the pre-vious island style layouts) impacting the interconnect-ing backbone structured cabling (migrating from cop-per to fiber, to meet bandwidth demands). This needs to be considered and discussed by the facility and IT design teams.

    IT hardware physical forms are changing as well. In an effort to become more energy efficient while deliver-ing ever higher computing performance at greater densities, even liquid based cooling is becoming a mainstream possibility. As an example, while we have previously discussed broader operating tempera-tures and the greater use of free cooling in the most recent version of the ASHRAE TC 9.9 Expanded Ther-mal Guidelines (see part 3 Energy Efficiency), it also contained a set of standards for water cooled IT equip-ment, defined as classes W1-W5.

    These water based standards outline cooling systems that can harvest the waste heat from IT equipment and deliver hot water to be used to heat buildings. The Green Grid has also addressed this with the Energy Reuse Factor (ERF), which is a metric that identifies the portion of energy that is exported for reuse outside of the data center. This type of water cooled IT hardware may not be mainstream reality for every operation, but the mere fact that it was incorporated into the most re-cent ASHRAE guidelines and addressed by The Green Grid, makes it a foreseeable scenario that is within the realm of possible options for hyper-scale or high performance computing, but may eventually become more widespread in future mainstream data centers.

    Moreover, there is a trend toward open source hard-ware (such as Open Compute), similar on nature to open source software. One needs to simply look at the success of Linux, which originally was developed as open source freeware alternative to UNIX (which at the time was the Gold Standard for enterprise class organizations). Now Linux is considered a reliable mainstream operating system for mission critical ap-plications. While Open Compute has publicly available hardware designs which can then be used as a basis for a blueprint for open source computer hardware, (see part 5 Custom Data Centers).

    Server Architecture Unique business models can also have an impact on the IT systems and therefore should be considered when designing a new data center. For example, while the X86 architecture has been (and still is) the dominant general purpose processor platform for over the last two decades, major IT manufacturers have launched a new generation of highly scalable servers that utilize low power processors that were originally designed for smartphones and tablets. One major vendor just released their modular server system that claims it can pack over 2,000 low power processors in a single rack, and that it is capable of delivering the same overall per-formance as 8 racks of their own X86 processor based servers, for certain types of hyper-scale tasks such as web-server farms. Of course, this architecture may not be in your IT roadmap today, however it may need to be considered as a possibility in the foreseeable future and its potential impact should not be ignored.

    Leonardo da Vinci

  • www.DataCenterKnowledge.com Contact: Edwin Rothrock 513-322-5616 [email protected] 4

    Data Center Designs

    Storage ArchitectureStorage demands have soared, in both the absolute to-tal volume, as well as the speed to access the data and search through it. Concurrent with that demand, Solid State Drives (SSD) has come to the forefront as the pre-ferred, but more expensive first level storage technol-ogy, due to its higher significantly read-write speeds, as well as its lower power use. Prices of SSD have come down significantly and will soon become the more dominate form of first level storage, with slower spin-ning disks as the second level in storage hierarchy. Moreover, SSD is also able to operate over a much wid-er environmental envelope (32-140F) than traditional spinning hard disks. This will lower data center cooling requirements and need to be considered as part of the long term strategy in the data center design.

    Network Architecture Although the design of the IT network fabric architec-ture is not directly part of designing the data center facility, the nature of its design and related structured cable and network equipment required by the IT end user of the data center facility must be taken into ac-count, rather than arbitrarily assumed or surmised by the data center designer.

    Data transmission demands and speeds have contin-ued to increase astronomically. Over the last 20 years we have gone from 4/16 Mbs Token-Ring, to 10, 100, Megabit and 1 Gigabit Ethernet networks, and current-ly 10, 40 and 100 Gigabit networks are the state-of-the art for the datacenter backbone. Yet not long after

    we deploy the next generation of hardware with its increased performance, we always seem to be band-width constrained. Even now the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is already working on a 400 Gigabit standard with 1000 Gigabit not far be-hind. This affects the physical aspects of the size and shape of network equipment and impacts its port den-sity and the size and type of network cabling (shifting from copper to fiber), as well as the cable support sys-tems deployed around the data center. This not only impacts the amount of space, power and cooling, it also requires more flexibility, as networking standards and architectures evolve. In addition as was mentioned above some vendors are merging and converging IT product lines which can impact the traditional island style layouts of Servers, Storage and Networks, which in turn refines the cable paths.

    One should consider that the significant changes that have occurred in the manner information is accessed, displayed and utilized by businesses and consumers on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. How do we architect a data center to meet technical changes of this ever increasing onslaught of end-user driven demand for ever more storage, requiring more computing performance and greater bandwidth re-quirements, which in turn impacts the IT equipment and therefore ultimately the data center?

    When designing a new data center, perhaps one of the first questions to ask is who is the end user? A tradi-tional enterprise organization will want a solid design that has a proven track record, most likely using stan-dard racks and IT hardware from major manufactur-ers, but may still have its own unique set of custom requirements that they have developed (see part 5 Custom Data Centers). While a co-location facility will need to offer a more generic traditional design to meet a wide variety of clients. Moreover, in sharp contrast, a large scale Internet hosting or cloud services provider is more likely to have a radically different requirement and may use custom built servers housed in physi-cally different custom racks (see part 5 Custom Data Centers). Even the need for the traditional raised floor has been called into question, and some new data centers have been built without, locating IT cabinets directly on slab.

    Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data.

    Information released by IBM, 2011

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    Data Center Designs

    Design for High Availability and System FailureIn the world of mission critical computing the term data center and its implied and projected level of availability has always referred to the physical facility and its power and cooling infrastructure. The advent of the cloud and what constitutes availability of a data center may be up for re-examination.

    It is 2013 and we have finally reached the stage where the proverbial five 9s of projected availability are simply not enough (~5 minutes of downtime per year). However, even the highest statistically projected num-ber of 9s, do not matter, if a data center experiences a failure resulting in outage. Nonetheless, it is clear that in our Internet driven economy it appears we can no longer tolerate any downtime.

    Designing for failure and accepting equipment fail-ure (facility or IT) as part of the operational scenario is imperative. As was discussed previously (see part 1 Build vs Buy), the ascending tier levels of power and cooling equipment redundancies can mitigate the im-pact of a facility based hardware failure. However, the IT architects are responsible for mitigating the overall availability of the IT resources, by means of redundant servers, storage and networks, as well as the software to monitor, manage and re-allocate and re-direct ap-plications and processes to other resources in the event of an IT systems failure.

    Traditionally there have been very little discussions or interactions between the IT architects and the data center facility designers regarding the ability of IT systems to handle failover. As more enterprise orga-nizations begin to visualize and utilize public and pri-vate cloud resources it may change the need for the amount of redundant IT resources located within any one single physical data center and create a logical re-dundancy shared among two or more sites. The ability to shift live computing loads across hardware and sites is not new and has been done many times in the past. Server clustering technology, coupled with redundant replicated data storage arrays has been available and

    successfully used for over 20 years. While not every ap-plication may failover perfectly or seamlessly yet, we cannot underestimate the long term importance of rethinking and including the ability of the IT systems to be part of our overall goal of availability, when making decisions about required redundancy levels of facil-ity based infrastructure, required to meet the desired level of overall system availability.

    The holistic approach to include an evaluation of the resiliency of the IT architecture in the availability de-sign and calculations should be part and parcel of the overall business requirements when making decisions on regarding the facility tier level, number of physi-cal data centers, as well as their geographic locations.

    This can potentially reduce costs and greatly increase overall availability, as well as business continuity and survivability during a crisis. Even basic decisions, such as how much fuel should be stored locally (i.e. 24 hours, 3 days a week for generator back-up), needs to be re-evaluated in light of recent events such as Super Storm Sandy which devastated the general infra-structure in New York City and the surrounding areas (see part 4 Global Strategies).

    It can be strategically advantageous to consider physically separated redundant data centers that have synchronized real-time (or near real-time) replication and redundant failover between sites. This may allow you to reduce the reliance of any single data centers level redundancy and therefore cost. Discuss if and how your organizations IT architecture can im-prove overall computing system availabil-ity, while reducing the dependency on the physical redundancy of the individual facility infrastructure.

  • www.DataCenterKnowledge.com Contact: Edwin Rothrock 513-322-5616 [email protected] 6

    Data Center Designs

    Ideally, the realistic re-assessment and analysis should be a catalyst for a sense of shared responsibility by both the IT and Facilities departments, as well as a catalyst for the re-evaluation of how data center availability is ultimately architected, defined and measured, in the age of virtualization and cloud based computing. These type of conversations and decisions must be motivated and made by the higher executive level of management.

    Designing for an enterprise type of user owner data center is different than for a co-lo, hosting or cloud data center. Also the level of system redundancy does not have to exactly match the tier structure. Many sites have been designed with a higher level of electrical re-dundancy (i.e. 2N) while using an N+1 scheme for cool-ing systems. This is particularly true for sites that use individual CRAC units (which are autonomous), rather than a central chilled water plant.

    Site Selection and Sustainable Energy Availability and CostThe design and site selection process need to be in-tertwined. Many issues go into site section, such as geographic stability, power availability as well as cli-matic conditions, which will directly impact the type and design of the cooling system. (see part 2 Total Cost of Ownership). Generally, the availability of suf-ficient power is near the top of the first critical check list of site evaluation questions, as well as the cost of energy. However, in our present era of social con-sciousness of sustainability issues, as well as watchdog organizations such as Greenpeace, the source of the power is also an issue that has become a factor, based on the type of fuel used to generate the power, even if the data center itself is extremely energy efficient. Previously, those decisions were typically driven by the lowest cost of power. Some organizations have picked locations based on the ability to purchase commer-cial power that has some percentage generation from a sustainable source. The Green Grid has defined the Green Energy Coefficient (GEC), which is a metric that quantifies the portion of a facilitys energy that comes from green sources.

    Overall sustainability and improved energy efficiency are not at odds with maximum computing system performance, and in fact when done as a cooperative effort, can result in a data center design that is also more cost effective as well.

    In other cases, some high profile organizations have built new leading edge data centers with on-site gen-eration capacity such as fuel cell, solar and wind, to partially offset or minimize their use of less sustainable local utility generation fuel sources, such as coal. While this would impact the TCO economics, since it requires a larger upfront capital investment, however there may be some local and government tax or financial in-centives available to offset the upfront costs. Nonethe-less, while this option may not be practical for every data center, green energy awareness is increasing and should not be ignored.

    In the demanding mission criti-cal world, almost any significant failure will become a public social media issue, not just cited on industry technical blogs, but in some cases on the 6 oclock news. The physical data center facility is still the primary foundation neces-sary to support the IT equipment and the applications they host. However, whether the failure is due to a failure in a facility based system or with the IT infrastruc-ture, they should be addressed holistically together, since one cannot exist without the other.

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    Data Center Designs

    Design for a Dynamic EnvironmentHistorically, data center IT loads have been relatively stable and predictable if viewed over a 24 hour or weekly period. This is beginning to change for sev-eral reasons. The first is virtualization, which origi-nally allowed for individual applications which were running on distributed and underutilized servers, to be consolidated on to more centralized hardware re-sources such as bladeservers, resulting in higher CPU and overall server utilization, contained in less space. More advanced virtualization software offers energy management features which can monitor computing demands. Excess resource capacity such as un-utilized servers can be put into low power sleep modes or even be powered off automatically when not needed, but which would power up and then be put back on-line as computing demands rise.

    The second reason is that the IT hardware itself be-came dynamic while becoming more energy efficient. Instead of wasting substantial amount of power when idle, they now reduce power significantly when idle, yet draw more power (and generated more heat) when called upon to do work. The US EPA Energy Star program for data center equipment requires this for Energy Star certification of IT equipment such as serv-ers, since 2009 and now is in the process of finalizing the standards for Storage and Network equipment. (See part 4 Energy Efficiency.)

    The result is twofold; the overall total IT power and cooling load has begun to vary more over time as the amount of computing load increased and decreased over a 24 hour cycle. Moreover, the heat IT loads have begun to shift from rack-to-rack and row-to-row, in response to demand driven computing activity, creat-ing traveling hot-spots across the data center.

    While the overall goal is to improve the energy effi-ciency of the IT systems, this has challenged a lot of older more traditional cooling systems which were not designed to handle these new more dynamic condi-tions. When considering a new data center design, the IT team needs to work with the facility design team to provide more information on the type of hardware they plan on using, as well as any of the energy man-agement features of the virtualization software, which can impact the design of the cooling system.

    Design for Efficient Operational and Energy ManagementWhile most data centers have some basic form of Build Management System (BMS), any new design needs to include a highly granular network of sensors in virtu-ally all of the systems and sub-systems of the facil-ity power and cooling infrastructure. Older, general purpose BMS systems typically had simple alarms to warn of equipment failures and perhaps a moderate amount of basic information on energy use. In recent years, it became clear that as data centers grew larger and used more complex systems, it became more dif-ficult for operators to keep track of all the critical infra-structure system operational details on maintenance requirements and energy efficiency.

    A newer more sophisticated class of systems designed specifically for data centers have been developed which are known as Data Center Infrastructure Man-agement (DCIM). They not only encompass monitor-ing energy usage and efficiency optimization, they can improve operational reliability, by early detection of operational anomalies. DCIM systems also can help track and schedule preventive maintenance and spot any trends of recurring problems.

    A state-of-the-art datacenter should be flexible enough to handle dynamic loads, yet remain energy efficient, as well as require fewer staff to monitor, manage, and maintain the systems. That is the goal, but often not the reality. In many cases, this is because the design was based on unshared information and processes that were kept in separate silos by the IT and facilities departments.

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    Data Center Designs

    While DCIM software varies widely based on ven-dor offerings and continues to evolve, the data cen-ter design should include pre-installed sensors (or at least pre-provision for sensors) at all the critical systems and sub-systems. You need to review a va-riety of DCIM vendor offerings to see which product features offers what you need. Regardless of your choice, make sure that you include the pre-instal-lation of sensors in the design phase. Adding sen-sors after building the facility is both costly and can be intrusive if the systems are already operational. Examples would be energy monitoring for every CRAC/CRAH and if a chiller system is involved, include chilled water flow metering, as well as energy monitoring of all the individual components such as compressors, pumps and fans. This information will allow you to optimize cooling system operation and energy efficiency. Moreover, with real-time monitoring and maintenance management you can detect trends and anomalies and proactively address potential issues be-fore they become critical problems.

    In addition, every point in the power distribution sys-tem to the IT equipment should have Branch Circuit Monitoring pre-installed. This will allow you to inte-grate real-time information from IT systems energy us-age and correlate it to computing activity to provide for better capacity planning, resource optimization and avoid islands of stranded capacity and improve fa-cility side provisioning of IT equipment deployments. No new data center should be designed or built with-out some form of DCIM system as part of the base infrastructure system. While DCIM requires additional investment, it can ultimately lower the TCO by improv-ing operational and energy efficiency, while reducing the number of data center and IT support staff.

    Design Lifecycle: Leading Edge vs Current PracticeOne of the design issues is the projected lifecycle of the facility and the ability of its infrastructure systems to be upgraded, in order to feasibly and cost effectively extend its long term viability. The data center facility is evolving at a much faster pace over the last several years especially when compared to the past 35 years. The designs and systems that were once considered as Leading Edge can become the new normal State-of-the-Art reliable modern facilities, with a good long lifecycle, if they have been well planned and have solid technical underpinnings. One such example is the use of fresh air free cooling, which would have been seen as unthinkable less than 10 years ago is becoming more common. (See part 3 Energy Efficiency.)

    The Software Defined Data CenterIT systems have moved to virtualize every aspect of the IT landscape; i.e. the Virtual Server, Storage and Network. The next step is the virtualization of the data center; the Virtual Data Center which is a term that has begun to appear along with Software Defined Data Center.

    While this sounds a bit fanciful, it does not mean that the physical walls and rows of racks of the data center will literally move or morph with the click of mouse, however, it refers to the concept that all the key IT components (Servers, Storage and Networking) being fully virtualized and transcending the underlying limi-tations of a physical data center. This does not mean the physical data center will cease to exist, however, it does imply that the new data centers must be able to be ready and be flexible enough to accommodate more changes in IT hardware designs and their new requirements. Virtualization has help to improve avail-ability and resource allocation and effectiveness, yet in many cases the physical facility designs have not nec-essarily reflected the changes that can result by a fully virtualized IT architecture.

  • www.DataCenterKnowledge.com Contact: Edwin Rothrock 513-322-5616 [email protected] 9

    Data Center Designs

    Design for a Mobile EnvironmentThe trend toward the mobile user continues at an ac-celerating pace and trends indicate that the mobile applications and hardware (Smartphones and tab-lets and even vehicle based systems) will exceed the PC based information client. This transformation cuts across many divergent business types from social media and search to streaming entertainment media and even basic financial retail banking, such as using a smartphone to take a picture of a check to deposit it. While on the surface this would not appear to im-pact the design of the physical data center facility, long term it may well influence some IT architecture and hardware that resides in the data center. In fact, it is foreseeable that as wireless devices and networks will require and carry more data than existing land based networks and data centers may directly or indirectly need to integrate into the wireless network infrastruc-ture. This may change the design landscape for data centers which may be designed to primarily deliver services to mobile clients.

    The Bottom LineAs a senior management executive it is your ultimate responsibility to look down the road and set the course for your organizations business direction and how it will shape the IT architectural roadmap.

    In addition to predicting the future, you also need to see around the next corner to foresee the fork in the road or avoid the cliff at the end of a wrong turn.

    In the information systems world, every year (or some-time every month) seems to bring the The Next Big Thing. And while previously most of those trends did not really have much impact on the physical design of data center itself, over the past few years even that has no longer been a certainty.

    We are still at the dawn of the 21st century and one only needs to look at the technological developments that have occurred since 2000. The rate of change for information technology is accelerating, it is has be-come totally interwoven with nearly every aspect of daily life. What is commonplace in daily life today was barely imagined in the science fiction stories of the earlier part of last century. The IT hardware built only 5 years ago may still be operational, but in most cases is considered as functionally or technically obsolete, as are many data centers that were built only 10 years ago but were designed based on historic IT requirements.

    It may seem easier to simply build on last years data center designs and avoid looking too far down the road. Nonetheless, todays data center needs to be de-signed for the future, not the past. Do not let the fear of endless scope or feature creep limit your consid-eration of being open to new design options. Yes, you will still need to draw a line somewhere, whether for budget or time constraints, but to not close your own mind or limit the design teams options to new ideas without first understanding their advantages (as well as potential pitfalls). Expansion and flexibility must be pre-designed in, not tacked or retrofitted on afterward as requirements change. The entire scale and scope of the demands and the delivery platforms have changed rapidly, and in some cases radical paradigm shifts in designs have occurred.

    Global mobile data traffic grew 70 percent in 2012. Global mobile data traffic reached 885 petabytes per month at the end of 2012, up from 520 petabytes per month at the end of 2011.

    Last years mobile data traffic was nearly twelve times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. Global mobile data traffic in 2012 (885 petabytes per month) was nearly twelve times greater than the total global Internet traffic in 2000 (75 petabytes per month).

    Mobile video traffic exceeded 50 percent for the first time in 2012. Mobile video traffic was 51 percent of traffic by the end of 2012.

    Mobile network connection speeds more than doubled in 2012. Globally, the average mobile network downstream speed in 2012 was 526 kilobits per second (kbps), up from 248 kbps in 2011.

    Source: Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 20122017

    The Mobile Network in 2012

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    Data Center Designs

    The physical infrastructure still needs to be reliable and solidly built, since it is the critical underlying foundation necessary to the security and availability of the IT sys-tem it contains. However, in todays socially conscious world, long term sustainability is no longer an option; environmental stewardship is now a requirement when planning any new project. Expect environmental sus-tainability issues to grow in importance in the immedi-ate and foreseeable future.

    And so in closing, we hope that this Executive Series has provided you with the insight and strategies to help guide you to ask the right questions to challenge and provoke yourself, as well as your IT architects and data center designers and ultimately enable you and them to make more informed decisions about what needs to be considered in the design of your next data center.

    Julius Neudorfer Bio

    Julius Neudorfer is the CTO and founder of North American Access Technologies, Inc. (NAAT). Based in Westchester NY, NAATs clients include Fortune 500 firms and government agencies. NAAT has been designing and implementing Data Center Infrastructure and related technology projects for over 20 years.

    Julius is a member of AFCOM, ASHRAE, BICSI, IEEE and The Green Grid, as well as a Certified Data Center Design Professional CDCDP designer and instructor. Most recently, he is also an instructor for the US Department of Energy Data Center Energy Practitioner DCEP program.

    Julius has written numerous articles and whitepapers for various IT and Data Center publications and has delivered seminars and webinars on data center power, cooling and efficiency.

    In todays socially conscious world, long term sus-tainability is no longer an option; environmental stewardship is now a requirement when planning any new project.

    Resources

    Executive Guide whitepaper links

    1. Data Center: Build vs. Buy

    2. Total Cost of Ownership

    3. Data Center Energy Efficiency

    4. Creating Data Center Strategies with Global Scale

    5. Custom Data Centers