Inside Intel: From silicon fabrication plant, to e
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We all know Intel for its chips, but perhaps we should be paying more attention to its data centers
March 13, 2019 By Sebastian Moss
Shesha Krishnapura is beaming. Of the many data center tours I have been on, Krishnapura’s is clearly the one with the most excited of guides. “Welcome to the world's best data center,” he says with a chuckle.
We’re in a huge, 690,000 square foot (64,100 sq m), five-story building right next to Intel’s global headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
“Where you are standing is an old Intel fab called D2. The last product that was made here was the first generation Atom in 2008. It was decommissioned by the end of 2008, so by 2009 it was available - just an empty space.”
Krishnapura, the CTO and senior principal engineer for Intel IT, "made a proposal to use D2 to learn how to build megascale data centers with energy efficiency, cost efficiency, and so on, in mind.”
“At the time, [then-chief administrative officer] Andy Bryant said ‘OK, you guys can have this fab to build, but first go and experiment in the old S11 building.’” There, Krishnapura’s team built a chimney cooling system, along with a traditional CRAC unit, to achieve a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.18. “It was our first experiment, and when we were successful at getting 30kW per rack with 24-inch racks, then we said ‘ok now let's go and break the barriers.’”
The result, built out over several years, is a data center with several unique elements, and an impressively low PUE. (con't)
Inside Intel: From silicon fabrication plant, to energy-efficient data center - DCD https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/analysis/i...ta-center/
-- Is this the World’s Most Energy Efficient Data Center Conference? - DCD https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/event-news...onference/