In 2017, over 5 million people in the U.S. worked as technology professionals. But when it comes to data centers, Intel is running the show. The company’s massive 690,000 square foot, five-story building is located right next to its global headquarters in sunny Santa Clara, California. Unsurprisingly, it contains a staggering amount of processing power: the largest center, named D2P3, boasts over 150,000 servers which work to provide a power capacity of 31 megawatts (MW). To put that into perspective, one megawatt produces roughly enough electricity to power 750 homes in California.
Though the power capacity alone is impressive, its power usage effectiveness (PUE) — or the ratio of how much energy is actually used by the computing equipment compared to cooling and other overhead systems — has been measured at 1.06, significantly below the worldwide average of around 1.7. Approximately 80% of data centers rely on hot or cold aisle containment systems to effectively manage energy use, and Intel has figured out an eco-friendly way to do just that.
“The city, when they process all the wastewater from homes, like sewer water and all the kitchen waste, they typically throw it into the Bay for natural evaporation,” explained Shesha Krishnapura, Intel IT CTO and Fellow. “But they also sell that water for industrial use, or landscaping or other stuff, at 50% lower cost. So we buy that to cool this data center.”
Immersing servers in liquid can improve rack density, cooling capacity, and data center design.
Intel has shrunk its number of data centers from 152 in 2003 to just 51, but Krishnapura explains that this was caused by a desire to shrink the company’s data center footprint. They closed the inefficient centers and focused on facilities that could handle new developments and push for lower PUEs. Despite closing so many centers, Intel is more powerful than ever.
“In 2002, we had 14,191 servers with single-core, two-socket CPUs, totaling 28,000 cores,” Krishnapura said. “Now we have 260,000 servers, we have 2 million cores, more than 315 petabytes of storage and more than half a billion network ports within the data center.”
To achieve this feat, they’ve made changes to the actual structure of the server racks: instead of the industry standard of 42 units at six feet tall, Intel has racks that contain 60 units and stand nine feet tall; they are also four inches slimmer.
“In 50 linear feet, where you can put 25 standard racks, we can put 30 of them. And as they’re taller, we can put a lot more servers: each rack supports all the way up to 280 servers, and each rack can support up to 43kW peak power load.”
Additionally, they use disaggregated servers which can be upgraded independently; though more than 200 billion fasteners are used in the U.S. every year, it only takes the removal of four screws — and subsequently 23% of the time spent previously — to assemble and disassemble server racks and access the units within.
Only time will tell where Intel’s — and Krishnapura’s — genius will take the company next.
