Datacenter architect creates bonkers designs to illustrate the craft, and quirks, of building bit barns
- Reference: 1701066621
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/11/27/fantasy_datacenter_designs/
- Source link:
The Sydney-based architect studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which specializes in tall buildings, and learned that designing skyscrapers is all about determining how to get services – power and water, mostly – to the people who need them.
"Forty storeys is a midrise in Chicago," he told The Register . But in Sydney, not many buildings top 30 storeys, never mind 40.
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Datacenters, however, are more interesting, and Sydney-based clients want plenty of them to build across Australia and the world.
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Fortin is therefore busy designing both concepts for datacenters and actual facilities. Clients often come to the firm he serves as managing director, Collard Maxwell Architects (CM+A), after first hiring generalist architects who lack the experience to realize a client's vision, or don't understand the nuances of datacenter design.
CM+A has designed datacenters since long before they were plentiful, or popular. Its founders worked on projects that housed punch-card machines.
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Then as now, the principles of datacenter design start with consideration of power and cooling services. Surveillance and security services are also vital but require less space.
Planning those services means calling on the same skills needed to build a skyscraper.
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"Just like a high-rise you design the core as tight as you can," he told The Register . "Make it as tight as possible on the inside and branch a building around that."
Hyperscalers like Equinix, he noted, want designs for large buildings that they can operate without needing to fill them with racks and equipment. Crypto-centric clients, on the other hand, insist on liquid cooling and often insist on difficult designs that Fortin sometimes finds impractical, but which after more work have turned out to be clever.
Whatever the brief, Fortin explained that 20 percent of a datacenter's area is usually shared between the operator's offices, facilities for tenants, and storage areas. Forty percent is data halls, and the remaining 40 percent is occupied by the kit needed to keep the bit barn powered, connected, and cooled.
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Fortin likes to doodle datacenter designs for different occasions, and recently posted a few to LinkedIn where The Register spotted them. With his permission, we present some of his designs, starting with the one below. It's a datacenter destined to blend in with the Australian outback – a location where the abundance of solar energy saw Fortin imagine a cold storage facility. He also thinks the outback's remoteness makes it a secure location for storing seldom-accessed data.
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Outback datacenter concept – Click to enlarge
Another design was inspired by datacenter operators [11]contemplating their own small modular nuclear reactors as a power source. Such reactors, Fortin noted, need a lot of water to keep them cool. And as nuclear reactors, rightly or wrongly, remain somewhat unpopular, he imagined an atom-powered datacenter cruising the seven seas and using satellite connectivity to serve data.
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Ship datacenter concept – Click to enlarge
Another of his offerings plays with datacenters' need for reliability and redundancy, and their role at the core of business, by building one into and around a heart-shaped rock – or is it brain-shaped?
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Rock heart datacenter concept – Click to enlarge
Datacenters on wheels are another idea Fortin wanted to explore, as are personal datacenters. And if that means mounting them in a car to get cheap cooling, why not?
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Personal car-mounted datacenter – Click to enlarge
Fortin also decided his hometown's most famous building – the Sydney Opera House – could become a datacenter.
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Sydney Opera House datacenter – Click to enlarge
On a more serious note, Fortin cautioned those considering a datacenter to remember the basics: like whether enough power is available to match a design. He's had clients brief him without checking that first. He also counsels considering – but not always following – the Uptime Institute's four-tiered resilience ratings.
"Those specs make sense for some business cases," he advised. "But you may not need to have all their requirements." Having fun is another option – one reason Fortin shared his designs is as a reminder that datacenters don't have to be featureless boxes. ®
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/14/backblaze_starts_tracking_temperature_drives/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/15/fujitsubacked_fdk_wants_nickel_zinc/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/10/datacenter_plans_blocked/
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[10] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/11/27/supplied_sydney_outback_datacenter.jpg
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/25/microsoft_nuclear_energy_manager_job/
[12] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/11/27/supplied_ship_datacenter.jpg
[13] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/11/27/supplied_rock_heart_datacenter.jpg
[14] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/11/27/supplied_car_personal_datacenter.jpg
[15] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/11/27/supplied_sydney_operahouse_datacenter.jpg
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"why aren't they using the roof for solar panels if it's out in the outback?"
My first question as well. Also, is the power generated from the roof going to be enough to operate the cooling, particularly since the outside temperature is going to have a very small difference to the hot air inside.
Z4
I've already got the car, now I just need the mini racks. Although, the engine is in the front so there's that.
Why do they have office desks and equipment outdoors? How does the driver see the road? What's up with the cabling mess on the rock? Why does the ship have some kind of platform around the keel? And is that a... a smaller ship sailing on its roof?
Let's tell it straight - these are "AI"-generated images, aren't they?
I will answer all of your questions the same way an AI does - by pulling answers out of my bum!!
Why do they have office desks and equipment outdoors? - It's in the desert, init? It's not like it's going to rain! The workers will be fine sitting out in 40+°C heat. We cant have them inside, ruining the sleek lines of the building after all...
How does the driver see the road? - The AI does the driving, durr... That's why you need all the racks in the car - to drive the car! Why do you think Autopilot is such a failure? It doesnt have anywhere near enough computing power on board...
What's up with the cabling mess on the rock? - Well it would hardly be a proper racked solution if the cabling wasn't a complete sh&tshow, would it?
Why does the ship have some kind of platform around the keel? - ummm... Those are the floaties? Boats need floaties, right? hmmm. Actually I really dont have a clue on that one. Some sort of Wharf, but in the middle of a river? Yeah, this one doesnt really make any sense...
And is that a... a smaller ship sailing on its roof? - Nahh that's the ships tower, it's just designed to look like a tug boat on the Sea. Admittedly the wave like roof at the front of the boat, probably means that the Tower cant see what's happening in front of the Ship, but since when should little practicalities like that get in the way of design aesthetics. I mean really, who cares if the ship cant see where it's going, so long as it looks good whilst going there...
:P
Has Jony Ive got a new gig ?
Cooling services
Just build a very tall chimney and stack the servers inside?
I like the first one, but the Engineer in me, immediately started asking why aren't they using the roof for solar panels if it's out in the outback???
One of the major issues that everyone forgets with sticking projects in the outback is that it's a very long way from anywhere - to drive from Darwin to Adelaide is about the same as driving from Lisbon to Warsaw. Stick something in the middle of that and you've got a long drive to get there from either end. (That's even assuming you've chosen something on the Stuart Highway, and not somewhere even more remote). Building costs are going to be massive as you need to bring everything to the build site, along with all of the builders, who will need accommodation whilst you're building (so add more cost for their accommodation, food, travel away on weekends, etc.). Once you're up and running, you need to pay for people to staff the site, and they're definitely going to be charging a premium for being stuck out in the middle of a desert. You're also going to need to sort accommodation for them, as even if you choose a relatively large town to be nearby, like Alice Springs, it's unlikely there will be enough empty housing to accommodate all your datacentre staff, so yep you are going to have sort something out there. Even if a lot can be done online these days, you still need a physical presence onsite - security, people to look after hardware, etc. After all, having staff drive a dozen hours (or more!) to get to your facitlity to fix something is not going to keep your customers happy. Also getting spares, etc. will be a slow and expensive delivery problem, so you're going to have to keep a lot of spare hardware on site...
Outback facilities, sound great on paper, cheap land, not likely to be damaged through flood or fire or any of the other myriad natural (or man-made) disasters that could affect other Datacenters, but the costs involved with building and running one would be massive....