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Data Center - Physical Layout |
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A data center can occupy one room of a building, one or more floors, or an entire building. Most of the equipment is often in the form of servers mounted in 19 inch rack cabinets, which are usually placed in single rows forming corridors between them. This allows people access to the front and rear of each cabinet. Servers differ greatly in size from 1U servers to large freestanding storage silos which occupy many tiles on the floor. Some equipment such as mainframe computers and storage devices are often as big as the racks themselves, and are placed alongside them. Very large data centers may use shipping containers packed with 1,000 or more servers each; when repairs or upgrades are needed, whole containers are replaced rather than repairing individual servers. |
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| Modern data centers try to use economizer cooling, where they use outside air to keep the data center cool. Washington state now has a few data centers that cool all of the servers using outside air 11 months out of the year. They do not use chillers/air conditioners, which creates potential energy savings in the millions. |
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