Submitted 8 hours ago by IcedRaktajino@startrek.website to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Like, would a skyscraper-style datacenter be practical?
Tall data centers do exist in cities where land is expensive. It’s the same reason everyone builds up in cities. Where land is cheap and available it’s usually easier and less expensive to build things low and wide.
Tall data centers do exist in cities where land is expensive.
Probably a bit of “hiding in plain sight” that way, too. There are a few big datacenters relatively near me, and they’re massive compounds in the middle of even more massive corn fields. Kind of stick out like a sore thumb when you’re driving by.
Cost. It’s slightly cheaper. And I do mean slightly.
It’s also not the core purpose of the data center. The building is a shell protecting racks of servers, the core purpose of a data center. Why spend anymore than absolutely necessary when it would not increase the output of that core purpose.
Depends on the price of the land.
Yeah that’s the only difference. Usually land is cheaper. But building high in the middle of nowhere is only like 5% more expensive.
I used to have a rack in a colo in the middle of Portland Oregon. The 3rd floor was the colo and they also had telecom equipment on the roof, but the rest of the building was normal commercial real-estate.
They spent so much reinforcing the floor, sound proofing the floor and ceiling, and building a giant door in the wall (so they could crane in equipment), and helping pay for a new local substation that when P.a.a.S. services (AWS, Azure, etc) they quickly started to struggle to keep the bills paid.
Soundproofing wouldn’t be needed if the whole building were servers, but the rest would be.
There are a few skyscraper server farms, but they are usually in major metropolitan areas like Manhattan. But, as you touched on, it is usually cheaper to build out instead of up.
In the past, we did have a need for purpose-built skyscrapers meant to house dense racks of electronic machines, but it wasn’t for data centers. No, it was for telephone equipment. See the AT&T Long Lines building in NYC, a windowless monolith of a structure on Lower Manhattan. It stands at 170 meters (550 ft).
This NYC example shows that it’s entirely possible for telephone equipment to build up, and was very necessary considering the cost of real estate in that city. But if we look at the difference between a telephone exchange and a data center, we quickly realize why the latter can’t practically achieve skyscraper heights.
Data centers consume enormous amounts of electric power, and this produces a near-equivalent amount of heat. The chiller units for a data center are themselves estimated to consume something around a quarter of the site’s power consumption, to dissipate the heat energy of the computing equipment. For a data center that’s a few stories tall, the heat density per land area is enough that a roof-top chiller can cool it. But if the data center grows taller, it has a lower ratio of rooftop to interior volume.
This is not unlike the ratio of surface area to interior volume, which is a limiting factor for how large (or small) animals can be, before they overheat themselves. So even if we could mount chiller units up the sides of a building – which we can’t, because heat from the lower unit would affect an upper unit – we still have this problem of too much heat in a limited land area.
Probably a combination of it being cheaper (as the others said) and data centers not really having to be near right next to cities. It’s easier to plop them in the middle of nowhere.
Taller is more expensive. That’s all.
If you have the space to go wider, that’s what everyone does.
Well, data centers require a lot of water for cooling. It’s harder to pump water up high.
It’s harder to do anything up high. Construction, climate control, transportation (moving something from one end to another), managing fires, additions, evacuation of personnel in an emergency, etc. etc., all get much harder when you build up up versus across.
Guess it depends on the height, but yeah. Otherwise, we manage to pump a town’s worth of water to the top of a tower well enough. From there, gravity can do the rest.
There’s a slow, steady source of water being pumped into those towers, so the water level fluctuates through the day. They use gravity to get high pressure from your tap, but I’m the world of liquid cooling, you gotta go fast!
The taller it goes the more they’ll have to value human life.
Cheaper and easier, perhaps? If the costs of engineering a tower is more than just buying more land, then why build taller?
It could also be local ordinances. Maybe they can’t get permission to build higher than 2 or 3 stories.
If the costs of engineering a tower is more than just buying more land, then why build taller?
Figured it’d be something like that. Explains why they get built out in the middle of nowhere since land is cheap.
Pistcow@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Electricity has a hard time flowing up and requires a special pumping system.
IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 7 hours ago
Which begs the question why not magnets at the top of the building to help pull the electricity up?
Triumph@fedia.io 7 hours ago
Because nobody knows how magnets work.
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
Because the electricity pulls the magnets down in the same measure, so they meet in the middle. Newton’s 2nd law or something.
phx@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
You joke, but heat does rise and a tall building would need to make extra concessions for cooling concerns, while also dealing with the issues if weight. Large racks of servers are actually quite heavy, which is why many datacenters in i.e Toronto were built in an ex parking garage
Prime@lemmy.sdf.org 17 minutes ago
Heat is no issue of relevance for the question. The rising effect it negligible compared to what has to be transported anyway
Successful_Try543@feddit.org 6 hours ago
Unironically, I’ve had people telling me they save electric energy by inserting the angled Schuko plugs of their electric devices ‘upwards’.