Inside a factory of the digital age

IF THE internet is the new industrial revolution, then data centres are its factories. Just about every “product” we consume online, from news to videos, social networks, music or games, is made possible by massive data centres designed to ensure the various web services can cope with ever-increasing volumes of visitors.

A data centre provides space for large amounts of computers and data storage, along with sufficient telecommunications capacity. Just as important is the power needed to keep the systems running and the backup procedures to guarantee the sites stay online.

Dublin is emerging as one of the prime locations in Europe for data centres. A frenzy of recent activity has seen Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Digital Realty Trust and others invest millions to build facilities near the capital.

But what are these places, and what happens inside them? The Irish Times was granted access to a tour of Telecity’s data centre at Northwest Business Park – one of three sites the company operates in Dublin.

Whereas some companies like Microsoft and Google operate their own data centres to serve customers directly, Telecity, formerly Data Electronics Group, provides a shared space for businesses to host their systems and keep them running.

If you have played the online Star Wars game Knights of the Old Republic, watched a film on Netflix, swapped foreign money through CurrencyFair or placed a bet with Bwin, chances are you will have done so via one of Telecity’s data centres.

Many online services deal in escapism, excitement or entertainment, but the data centres they rely on emphatically don’t. When it’s put to Telecity Ireland general manager Maurice Mortell that boring is the ideal state for a data centre, he doesn’t seem offended. “No issues is good,” he says.

“If it’s an online gaming service or a betting site, it’s got to be live. If it goes down it loses millions in revenue,” says Mortell.

Like the factories of old, the means of production are largely invisible to the consumer. Data centres take this anonymity literally.

Arriving at the Telecity site, there’s little to distinguish the unremarkable grey building from others nearby. It purposely draws little attention to itself; no signage tells the casual passer-by what this place is or hints at its valuable contents.

The only indication this particular facility might be more carefully guarded than most is the presence of thick, retractable metal bollards almost directly behind a sturdy black gate. An invisible infra-red beam circles the building’s perimeter, we learn later.

Mindful of protecting the systems and the data on them, data centre operators approach security with a rigour bordering on the paranoid. That explains the 1,200 CCTV cameras activated by motion sensors and the X-ray machine with a metal detector like those seen in airports. To gain access, visitors must type a code into the keypad and place their palm onto a biometric scanner to confirm their identity.

Inside, the Telecity site has three floors for customer equipment, totalling 8,730sq m (93,970sq ft). Some €45 million has been invested in the facility so far, and an expansion slated for June will cost a further €20 million, bringing an additional 4.2 megawatts of power. At full capacity, the centre will draw down 11 megawatts of power from the electricity grid.

Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) are constantly on standby, so if mains power is lost for any reason, the centre can run for 30 minutes on the UPS systems before the six on-site generators start up. In reality, this process of switching between UPS and generator power takes just 30 seconds.

Equipment on the floor is always connected to both the UPS and the electrical mains. There are three UPS systems in each room and two rooms per floor. The generators have 12,000 litres of diesel and are tested weekly.

High-speed links to more than 15 different telecoms providers ensure the centre is constantly connected.

Most of the equipment is duplicated so that if any single one should fail, another can instantly take its place. This is known as N+1 configuration, and is standard practice in the industry. Commitments to customers to keep their systems running are called service level agreements or SLAs. Telecity offers four nines, or 99.99 per cent reliability.

The nerve centre for keeping those promises is the facility’s network operations centre (NOC) that is staffed around the clock in three eight-hour shifts. The surprisingly small room is dominated by eight large wall-mounted monitors flickering between the centre’s various systems.

On our tour, the first windowless server room is still being fitted out, and there’s plenty of open floor space with a handful of server cabinets that rise from floor level almost to the ceiling. Downstairs, the room is at full capacity and the air throbs with the constant hum of concentrated computing power.

As anyone who has rested a laptop on their knees will know, computers generate lots of heat. In a data centre housing thousands of servers, dispersing that heat is critical to keeping running costs manageable. This is done by facing each server rack in the same direction along one aisle, while cold air is carried along the opposite row.

Water is pumped around the centre in a closed-loop system to remove heat from the floor, and the raised floor has leak detection systems. Each computer room is constantly controlled for temperature and humidity.

The water itself is cooled by the air which – this being Ireland – naturally tends towards chilly. As a side note, this freely available resource is helping to make Ireland an attractive location for data centres, because the cost of cooling a data centre is often equal to the cost of powering it.

The factory analogy breaks down at this point, as sightings of actual people at work on the servers are few. “It isn’t a hugely people-hungry business. A lot of the services are automated. The economies of scale are very large in this business. It takes the same number of people to deliver a service to 20 clients as it does to 200 clients,” says Mortell.

Telecity Ireland employs 40 engineers across its three Irish sites, and a staff of just 60 in total. The model is typical of the industry.

Data centres strive to keep systems “up” as long as possible, but in real life, things occasionally go wrong. Last August one of Amazon’s Dublin sites went offline for two days. The fault was originally blamed on a lightning strike but further investigation revealed it as a transformer problem.

Incidents like these make contingency planning essential. Telecity regularly tests its disaster recovery procedures against various potential scenarios, like a generator failure or loss of a critical database, says technical director John Shorten.

“You do need to be prepared for the event. That means testing, and ensuring the plans you have put in the locker are ready to be invoked and everybody’s up to date,” he says.

As long as consumer appetites continue to be whetted by the range of online content and the means of consuming it, data centre demand seems assured.

Telecity evidently thinks so: its presence in Ireland came about by last year’s €100 million acquisition of Data Electronics, until then the country’s largest indigenous data centre operator. Telecity group’s 2011 growth of 11 per cent gives further indication of the sector’s rude health.

Add cloud computing to the mix, along with the growing trend of businesses outsourcing to facilities like these, and their place at the centre of the digital future becomes clearer.