Tag Archives: singapore datacentre

To Build or not to Build a Datacentre

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Our company had been approached by several sincere partners about the prospects of building a datacentre to house our servers. This is a very major investment as the cost of a datacentre setup is between $200 to $2000 per square feet. The monthly expenditure can come up to be about $100 000/mth and the maintenance fees will set us back about $1 million dollars a year.

This is clearly beyond our reach at the moment. Coupled with a dire need for good support and service engineers. We are having a headache deciding whether or not to proceed. To proceed would radically depart from our core competency of providing services rather than infrastructure and would clearly put us in direct competition with the huge ISPs rather than being on partnership with them.

A quantum leap if we were to proceed and given the current demand for rack space, if we can do it fast enough, we will be able to capture a sizable share of the market. However, if the economy softens we will be in deep financial problems due to the massive startup and maintenance. Really something to ponder about.

Moderation in Singapore Web Hosting Datacentre

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I have seen overcrowding in many racks in a lot of Singapore datacentres. Once I calculated more than 30 servers in a rack. Of course if you can put in as many servers as possible in a rack, you can benefit as the cost of rack divided by number of servers will reduce your cost and enhance your profit margins.

singapore server

This is a typical 2U server, to save costs a lot of users use desktop as servers instead. Imagine 30+ servers inside one rack, the heat generated inside the rack as well as the power consumption.

Singapore Data Centre

In a datacentre there are rows and rows of racks, imagine a few of these racks that are overcrowded generating surpass heat in the datacentres. The air conditioning temperature of the datacentre would be affected. Also those that are unlucky enough to be the immediate neighbors will find that their racks are sucking in warm air from those overcrowded racks. Over crowding heat will also cause the equipment such as servers (either rack mounted or desktop) to be spoilt more easily.

There is also one layer of concern, a critical area. Datacentre owners built datacentre to earn money, if they have to spend excessive amount of money to power your overcrowded racks and also to cool down your racks, they would not get the profits they needed.

In a business world, the datacentre needs to make money and so does the rack owners. Therefore it is advisable not to overcrowd your racks so that there won’t be too much additional costs to be borne by the datacentre, you make some money and the datacentre make some money. In this way the relationship will be cemented and long lasting.

Singapore Datacentre

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I have been to nearly all the datacentres in Singapore. Can’t post any pictures of the datacentres here. All of them have a policy that forbids any photography of their datacentre for security reasons.

Can only post a stock photo. Our web site do have our datacentre photos, but that have to go through the marketing and legal department so I am not willing to go through all the troubles for a blog.

One datacentre boast of 6 layers of bullet proof glass panels. Another took 7 Card access points before you can enter. These is extremely safe for the servers and routers.

But if anything happen to you? God Bless You. They need to go through 6 layers of bullet proof glass panels just to retrieve your body :)

Datacentre is something like that

datacentre.jpg

What you see above are all rows of racks and racks and racks. Each rack can be 42U to 52U or something in between. A U is a measurement of thickness of the server.

server.jpg

This is a 2U server. 1U is 1.75in (44.4mm) high. So you can imagine 2U. All these are mounted onto the 42-52U racks. So you can imagine how many rack servers can each rack take. Given say 1000 racks, how many servers are inside the datacentre and how much heat is generated. Especially if you use 1U servers and stack as much as you can. Typical datacentre power consumption can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Cost of building a datacentre range between $200 to $2000 per square feet depending on how reliable you want your datacentre to be.   So I can’t help laughing when technicians told me they have datacentre in their office which just happen to be a rack with a few normal computers inside.

A real datacentre needs some minimum features.

1.   Uninterrupted Power Supply Units

2.   FM 200 Suppression System

3.   Backup Diesel Generators

4.   Temperature and environmental control

FM200 system dispense powder when it detects fire, instead of water, just a blast is another few hundred thousand dollars gone.   Even with $2000 per square feet price tag, I guess that can give you 99.999% uptime guarantee.  For 100%, separate redundancies is needed.

Tragedy I – Datacentre Closure

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Our web hosting requirements for racks escalated and as one of my friends are working in a new datacentre, we were persuaded to take up space there. Then problems started. The company was taken over and the new owner closed down the datacentre immediately. We had to find a new location and fast! We moved back to our existing datacentre by expanding the number of racks there. This is the first time we tried moving, it really was a lot of work, even for a few servers.