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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Among other major data center builders, Google (www.google.com) and Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), that have been known to maintain secrecy over their data center efficiency, the most secretive of them all, Yahoo (www.yahoo.com), has revealed a number of innovations in cooling design and energy efficiency ratings, and they fall in the same ball park as its rivals, according to a Data Center Knowledge report.
Yahoo chief architect, Adam Bechtel, who is responsible for network, storage, and systems at Yahoo, presented "Machines or MegaWatts" to a San Jose, California audience at the O'Reilly Velocity 2009 conference (en.oreilly.com/velocity2009/), in which he discussed how naming conventions did not fit many aspects of Yahoo!’s infrastructure as it grew.
According to Rich Miller's Data Center Knowledge report, Bechtel shared details of a pod-based system, which involves server cabinets being grouped into "podules" with an overhead cooling module providing a cold-aisle as opposed to standard raised floor cooling. This patented data center design has helped Yahoo lower its Power Usage Effectiveness, which compares a facility's total power usage to the amount of power used by the IT equipment. Bechtel said its PUE was 1.21, nearly matching the best numbers reported by Google and slightly surpassing Microsoft's lowest PUE.
According to material filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, Yahoo's data center rack enclosures in some instances involve tightly packed server racks, even employing clamps and/or sealing gaskets to further reduce air leakage. The server cooling fans draw cold air from cold row encapsulation structure from the front face of the server racks and to eject hot air from the back side of the server racks.
Yahoo also suggests that cold water may be used to exchange heat with hot air in the cooling module. While the patent presents a closed air system configuration, it also suggests mixing outside cool air to cool the servers to take advantage of "free cooling."
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October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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