Building a new data center used to take 18 to 24 months. New design and construction strategies have helped reduce the build times for new data centers. But nothing accelerates the data center construction process like time-lapse video, which turns days into seconds and can visualize the transformation of a green field or empty room into a high-tech data center in a matter of moments.
MONSANTO
Monsanto's time-lapse video taken at its headquarters campus in Creve Coeur, Missouri, shows the construction of its 40,000 square-foot data center. Starting with an empty green lot, in just 90 seconds the video shows the $21-million facility grow from the ground up and turn into a finished data center. Fascinating to watch.
RED SKY SUPERCOMPUTER
The installation of the Red Sky supercomputer located in the Albuquerque, NM facility of the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories is documented in this video. The supercomputer is the 10th fastest on the Top500 list, with a sustained performance of 429.9 teraflops. Red Sky consists of 68 cabinets of Sun Constellation gear, with up to 96 nodes and 678 cores per rack. Each cabinet can each require up to 32 kilowatts of energy at full load.
This system is also unique for its energy efficiency. Red Sky has an estimated Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.035, which is possible due to the deployment of the Sun Cooling Door (also known as Project Glacier) designed jointly by Sun Microsystems and Emerson Network Power.
PHOENIX NAP
Opened summer 2009, data center service provider Phoenix NAP spent twelve months constructing the 160,000 square-foot facility located in Arizona. The video shows one aspect of the huge project, the installation of raised flooring used in the server areas.
CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
Concordia University in Portland, Oregon renovated their server room in 2007 and in the process, relocated 200 meters of fiber optics and more than 1 mile of copper cabling. Three-months of labor rolls by in this time-lapse video running just 5 minutes.
Data Center Knowledge Videos
For additional videos, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.