MISSION CRITICAL work on operational efficiency on the facilities side of the business . “ We ’ ve tried to promote collaboration in the data centre construction industry with the focused intent of driving innovation and embracing areas of technology we think we can accelerate and improve upon ,” he maintains . “ Technologies that have traditionally been controlled and managed by a standards organisation , but they tend to move pretty slow with consensus building . We ’ ve been able to move faster by enhancing direct communication between the hyperscale end users that drive the business providing the financial means , and the innovation of technology providers .”
Carter recalls with the traditional model you had a OEM or ODM ( such as Dell , IBM or HP ) that gathered all of that technology together and turned it into a project . They had control over that conversion and what technology actually made it to the marketplace .
“ Now we provide a means for these technology providers to collaborate more directly with end users ,” he says , adding that the one area of innovation , constant since OCP ’ s inception , is around energy and efficiency where its keen to push the envelope with new initiatives . “ The traditional data centre brings in power routed out to the physical racks connected to the servers ,” explains Carter . “ Each of these servers has a redundant power supply so they usually have two power sources with two cords fed to those sometimes from two different utilities in the area to provide that resiliency . You can have up to 80 servers in a rack of equipment , so you have a lot of duplication , and the problem with that 1 + 1 resiliency model ( where you have a hot spare for back up ) is that at any given time , each supply is only going to run 50 % of its output which is not very efficient . In the very first Facebook design , which they called the Open Rack , they took all of the power supplies out of the server and into a power shelf in the rack and powered that via a higher voltage input power – they did one conversion to 12v and then bussed that across . Architecturally , that conversion from 480v achieved in excess of 90 % efficiency which alone saved energy and eliminated all of the power supply elements in the
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