Sun Microsystems-Shared Labs

The company has consolidated the infrastructure of their datacenter in

Bangalore and deployed efficient power and cooling solutions to save on space

and costs.

With the increase in R&D activities, the company is in dire need of space and

hardware for newer, higher density compute equipment. Continuing with the older

model would have adversely impacted their revenues. So, they decided to go in

for a new design based on APC's hot aisle containment technique. The cooling

solution utilizes APC's RC (Row Cooling) technology. The devices trap and

neutralize the heat generated by the equipment to eliminate the mixing of hot

and cold air in the room.

These units sense the temperatures and speed up or slow down the cooling fans

as required. The RCs are placed in such a way that there is enough airflow even

with an entire RC failure in each row. While taking up this project, the company

had to overcome many challenges. The entire lab and supporting infrastructure

had to have reliable power and cooling to operate. To achieve this all the

compute equipment and cooling units in the lab are backed by 100 % UPS and

diesel generators. The company has deployed standard racks in the new labs to

provide an intelligent, consistent footprint to all lab users.

Project Specs Business problem:With the increase in business, the company needed more IT hardware and physical space for their data center. IT solution:They used an intelligent sensor-based cooling and power solution from APC apart from the standard virtualization techniques for consolidating their servers. Impact:They achieved a 51% reduction in space and a 30% operational efficiency gain. IT Implementation Partner:APC

Ramesh K.V., Regional Manager Work Place Resources - India

This lab has the densest cabling configurations amongst all labs at Sun,

worldwide. The standard racks are 30” wide and allow for proper cable management

without impeding airflow. The modular 0U rack PDUs are metered, monitored and

allow remote switching of all outlets.

Each rack also has Environmental Monitoring Units (EMUs) to monitor humidity

and temperature per rack. To ensure that chilled water is in constant supply to

the lab, the chiller pumps and booster pumps are being supported by DG and UPS.

Both the chiller and booster pumps have redundant pumps. The lab is designed to

support 82 racks at 8 kW per rack footprint, along with 10 IDF racks at 4 kW per

footprint. This forms five hot aisle containment configurations, separated into

various zones. What's more, each zone also has two IDF cabinets supporting each

row. There are 10 APC 80kw ISX UPS in this solution. The UPS design provides two

source feeds per rack. This enables redundancy and improves availability of the

infrastructure.