This week’s blog is short, but it’s about the candy: the Rack — the Data Center’s building block.
The pictures below visually describe what each one of us would like to have in their Data Center.
Density – over 150 cores within less then 10U. Three different interconnects, 1GigE, 10GigE and 40Gb/s InfiniBand, using two adapters and no thick jungle of cables. –> 25% Savings in rack space.
Power – less servers, w/o giving up any compute power; less adapters, without giving up any capabilities; less switches, without giving up any reliability or bandwidth –> 35% Savings in power.
Cost – with a smaller amount of switches and smaller servers’ size, the saved space enables better cooling. Cost is (inevitably) lower by 25%.
Just imagine this Rack with only a single interconnect of choice, and you’ll experience what I and many people have seen: a simple tidy solution leads to better functioning of teams and faster responses to problems (if they ever occur).
Bringing the rack into a functional condition hasn’t been the easiest thing, I agree. When last time I said that some “labor pain” was involved, I mainly meant pain in finding a place in the data center… I never knew how hard it could be to allocate floor space before going through this experience. But once we got the rack built in place (standing there in the corner can be a bit claustrophobic 
), sliding in the servers and switches took almost zero time. And thanks to a pre-prepared image of the OS, the entire rack was up-and-running within less than 24 hours.
I’ll leave you at this point to see the rack for yourself. I’ll be back in my next post with the first market application that we’ve used with that “Data Center in a Rack” – GigaSpaces.
Nimrod Gindi
nimrodg@mellanox.com
