Data Center Open House
In an open house late last month, Denise Moser, manager of consolidated operations for the Office of Information Technologies (OIT), basked in the satisfaction of a job well done as students, faculty and staff toured the newly renovated data center, a facility that comes under Moser’s purview.
“It finally looks like a data center should,” Moser says, an impish smile hinting that the facility was a little on the ragged side when work began on it 18 months ago.
Located on the first floor of the IT Center Building, the data center houses the computer servers, power backup equipment and monitoring consoles that power the central networked computer systems serving the University.
The major overhaul provides the infrastructure foundation for Renovare, the five-year program to replace Notre Dame’s administrative computer systems.
But the main driver of the project resulted from years of delayed maintenance, notes Notre Dame CIO, Gordon Wishon.
What made the project particularly challenging, says Moser, was reworking a space created decades ago for a mainframe environment to effectively accommodate today’s server-based systems, while keeping current services up and running.
Don Padgett, program manager for strategic initiatives in the OIT and the person Moser tapped to organize and keep the project on a strict timeline, says the cooling, cabling and monitoring requirements for rows of dozens of servers racked with backup power supplies is obviously different from what is required to support a single mainframe in the middle of the room.
On August 9, 2003 in a weekend event that Padgett dubbed Serv-O-Rama, a crew of 30 disconnected, moved, reconnected and restarted over 80 servers without a major unplanned outage.
Earlier last year, much of the work in 2003 focused on adding auxiliary air conditioning systems and totally reworking the electrical systems, including installation of a diesel powered backup generator, explains Frank (Tom) Laughner, hardware planning engineer, and another key member of Moser’s team.
It was Laughner who came up with the idea of using distributed power backup systems. Not only does this approach eliminate the single point of failure posed by one single power backup source, but it also spreads the physical load of heavy batteries and power supplies across the data center floor.
“We originally looked at a traditional single backup power source,” says Laughner. “But you’re talking about putting 7,000 pounds of equipment in one small area,” he explains. “There was a beam in the floor that the structural engineers in Facilities said would support that kind of load, Laughner notes, “but none of us was all that excited about seeing how it would hold up over time.”
The data center was completed in April when the last of the new console and monitoring equipment was installed, says data center consultant Mike Ball who reports to Moser. “Operators used to run from one monitor and keyboard to another, but now they can control different devices in different racks from a single computer,” Ball says.
What happens if/when the University moves the data center to a different building?
Most everything is portable,” Ball says.
You can review additional detail and some photographs about the renovation effort by downloading this PowerPoint file.