What is a data center?
STORY BY RYAN HALL | RURAL MONTANA EDITOR
Data center is a buzzword that appears seemingly everywhere, but it’s a broad term that is often used too narrowly, according to one data center manager.
Ryan Beebout, vice president of Sabey Data Centers – West, said that much like electric cooperatives, data centers come in different sizes and serve different needs. Not all data centers focus on generative AI (artificial intelligence), a common belief.
Sitting in the conference room of Sabey’s 123 MW facility outside of Quincy, Washington, Beebout explains that while some of the clients who rent space in the facility use AI, there’s little to no actual AI computing done on site.
“It’s not a focus of ours,” Beebout said, noting that a lot of AI technology is not investment grade, and Sabey is “somewhat risk averse” when it comes to AI.
He said the belief that if people stopped using AI for ChatGPT or tools such as Canva and Photoshop, the need for data centers would disappear, is wrong.
Data centers are a fast, secure, efficient way to do the computing that is needed to power today’s society and economy.
“If there’s no data centers, your phone is a brick, it’s on airplane mode permanently,” Beebout said. Enterprise customers renting space in Sabey’s co-location data center perform photo cloud, health record, phone app, online banking, e-commerce and travel reservation-related computing functions.
“We have all of these things on site,” he said. “We rely on all of this stuff.”
Beebout added that any app opened on a phone or tablet, “is a window into a data center.”
He said there’s so many functions people don’t think of that go through data centers. Almost every massive telescope, such as the ones producing space images shared across the world, run through a data center. If your job involves using a phone, computer or even GPS, you utilize a data center. Even farms utilize data centers through the GPS in equipment and various programs that track soil nutrients, pesticides and moisture content.
“The whole economy relies on data centers,” he said. “If AI crashed tomorrow, we’re still operating tomorrow.”
In fact, data centers would still grow, Beebout said, just at a different pace.
Data centers are not new
Due to the rapid growth in the AI space, data centers have become a mainstream media topic over the last few years. But, they have been around long before that. Microsoft recently celebrated 20 years in the Quincy area by donating 20 $10,000 checks to area organizations. Sabey has been in town for nearly that long, and was founded before that, in 2000.
Beebout said before modern-day data centers there were mainframe rooms in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and then basement server rooms. Centralized computing, and the need for cloud storage, has come a long ways since then.
Anatomy of a data center
Beebout and Amber Daniels, assistant general manager for the Sabey plant, walked through the data center hallways, which are wide, with large placards boasting company mottos and Sabey branding on the walls. Beebout explained that the doors in the facility are all double-secure due to the private nature of the information being processed. He has to badge in, and then either do a fingerprint or face scan to open a door.
He walked to a gray door, explaining that this is one of the three operational data halls in the center, with five more planned. As a colocation center, Sabey rents space to other entities for computing, so they don’t have to construct a full data center themselves. It is similar in many ways to a shopping mall, in that Sabey provides the large building but instead of store fronts, other companies rent as much space as they need inside the data halls.
Not all data centers are colocation facilities — one of the many potential differences of the types of centers grouped together under one term.
Beebout explains that each data hall can have multiple tenants. Sabey provides the secure space, with access to power, cooling capability, and a clean and sterile environment. Once completed, with a planned expansion, Sabey’s plant will use 123 megawatts. It currently runs around 57 megawatts, and does that consistently.
“It’s pretty flat, we run at about a 90-percent load factor,” Beebout said. “We find the PUDs (public utility districts) like that.”
Load factor is the ratio of actual energy used to the maximum possible energy used during a specific period, or simply how efficient and consistent something uses the power allocated to it. A high load factor benefits the utility for reasons that will be discussed later in this series.
In this data hall, there are two tenants, each having their computing infrastructure within a secure cage. There is also ample space between the two, but that’s already been reserved by one of the current tenants, who plans to expand. With data center demand always increasing, many clients rent more space than they plan to use, so they can expand and keep their servers at the same facility, and within the same data hall, Beebout said.
“It’s built by Sabey, but they own everything inside the cage,” Beebout said. “They provide their own servers, and design their network architecture.”
Walking through the cool, empty space between the two cages, where someday the concrete floor will be filled with racks, Beebout explained that “real estate” is different in the data center world. The commodity is not floor space, it’s the power to compute. So Sabey’s tenants don’t rent by the square foot, they rent by the kilowatt.
“It costs a lot more for us to deliver power and cooling than it does to deliver square footage,” Beebout said. “We can strand space, we cannot strand capacity.”
Looking inside the cage, every server has two plugs, a blue and a red, that go to separate breakers. The servers are housed in racks, and the racks are in rows, similar to books in a library.
“We can’t have any single source of failure,” Beebout said.
The server room is kept at between 65 and 81 degrees Fahrenheit, and at about 50 percent relative humidity. Above each server pod is a sealed containment structure, which captures the hot air.
All of the air circulated through the data halls is kept in a closed loop, so that no dust or smoke particles from outside get inside.
“Servers don’t like dust or smoke,” Beebout said.
As he speaks, an employee of a tenant walks through her company’s server stacks. Beebout said that between Sabey and its tenants, about 250 people work on the campus.
“Those are permanent jobs,” he said, noting that’s about five full-time employees per megawatt. “Not every site will have that many.
“Our people, we live here, we go to school here, we buy houses here, we are part of the community,” Beebout said.