California State’s Office of Technology Services (OTech) is in the middle of a data center consolidation project, condensing several facilities and many small IT and computer rooms into one data center that is being remodelled to accommodate the load.

System analysts Damon Yates and Rainer Schwertschkow run the facility. They created the new design and are responsible for implementing the changes.

DatacenterDynamics FOCUS interviewed Yates and Schwertschkow about the project at the Critical Facility Round Table conference in Fremont, California.

Schwertschkow works on the facilities side, while Yates is responsible for IT. They began the four-year project in July.

DCDF: Tell us about the state’s existing IT infrastructure.

Yates: We have a 40,000 sq ft raised floor data center and it currently has 500 racks of equipment. We are looking to reposition the racks in a more efficient manner and, hopefully, through the redesign, double that capacity to 1,000 racks within that same square footage.

There is one data center that this project involves. There’s an effort underway to close down some other data centers in the area and we will receive quite a bit of the equipment from those data centers.

We had two data centers in downtown Sacramento that closed. One of them was 20,000 sq ft of raised floor space. That closed down last year and the equipment was moved into an existing 50,000 sq ft facility.

Now that data center is scheduled to close… next year. [It] will then be offloaded and shared between a 7,500 sq ft leased facility and our 40,000 sq ft raised floor space.

DCDF: Why was consolidation necessary?

Schwertschkow: We had data centers that were not fully utilised and at least one of them was getting very old – the building is more than 100 years old and the center was created in 1983. Also, it is not the state’s building – it’s leased and the landlord wants the building back.

Yates: [The project] started about a year ago and the idea was, if we could take the existing data center and redesign it – pretend there is no equipment in it and just design it from scratch – what would it look like? Rainer and I came up with the design and management really liked it. Consultants who build data centers then reviewed it and said: “Go ahead and implement this. Make it happen.”

Schwertschkow: [Our data center] is by far more efficient and specifically designed for dataprocessing equipment, where some of the existing small data closets and computer rooms are not. They are often not even raised floor (facilities) and inadequately cooled, not power backed up, for example.

Yates: The project is currently estimated as a four-year development, starting 1 July 2009, and there is an effort to expedite that. The sooner we can complete it, the sooner we can bring in more customers and they can get off their inefficiently used raised floor spaces and get onto one that is more efficient.

DCDF: What are some of the project’s most challenging aspects?

Yates: There are three things we are looking at: space; power; and cooling. We have to do a balancing act between those three issues. Since we are working with a production data center, it is hard to manipulate any one of those aspects while we are still in production. So, as we are able to free up space, we also have to add additional power and cooling to those areas.

Schwertschkow: …without going down. We cannot allow outages just because of our job, so it is a balancing act: how can we, for instance, change out an existing Automatic Static Transfer Switch (ASTS) or a Power Distribution Unit (PDU) and bring in new equipment without an outage. That is one of the challenges we face.

DCDF: How do you address that challenge?

Schwertschkow: Most of our equipment, luckily, is tool power-fed. So, by carefully identifying all the lines – all the power that goes into a rack, for instance – we can isolate the ‘A’ feed, [disconnect] the ‘A’ feed from the equipment, locate the other end at the PDU and in that way free everything on that one.

At the same time, we are bringing in a new PDU as we take out the old line going to the old PDU. We are hooking up the existing equipment with the ‘A’ line to the new PDU and then we repeat the same procedure with a ‘B’ line – with the alternate feed. And thus, we have eliminated everything from the old PDU, which we can then take out and the load has been – by way of a doublestep system – transferred to the new PDU.

DCDF: What are some of the state’s most mission-critical applications?

Schwertschkow: Every department, basically, requests and demands that they do not go down. We have the Health Department and Highway Patrol, and you name it. And none of these agencies can go down even for a moment.

Yates: When it comes to actually relocating equipment, the servers have to come down. We usually target that through either a refresh of equipment or through their normal PM schedules. That would be the only exception: when stuff has to come down to be relocated.