A cool data center

Communications News, July, 2007

When a fire broke out in one of PerkinElmer's reagent labs, located on the fifth floor of a Boston building, water had to be pumped from fire hoses on the streets, as opposed to targeting from the inside, due to the ecological nature of the lab environment. More than 40 percent of the site's production labs were destroyed. The "what-ifs" associated with the fire, however, set off more reactive responses than dealing with the water damage at hand.

To support the company's growth plans, the active reagents labs and a demo lab were moved out of Boston and consolidated with the corporate and administrative staff of the Wellesley, Mass., headquarters into a new, expanded facility in Waltham (20 miles outside of Boston). While the intensive planning and construction of this 110,000-square-foot facility was in the works, the data center was moved to a protected collocation facility without incurring any outage or service disruption.

"When faced with the design of a network for our new facility, I wanted to avoid cabling pitfalls that I've seen throughout my career," states Michael French, network services manager, corporate information systems, for PerkinElmer. "I wanted to ensure that everything--from the design to all the components--in the data center, the main distribution frame (MDF) and intermediate distribution frames (IDF) created a failsafe network. That includes every detail down to keeping the cable easy to manage and identify."

PerkinElmer is a $1.6-billion global company with more than 8,500 employees dedicated to developing and producing equipment for furthering optoelectronics and life sciences, including reagent exploration. After the Boston lab fire, the firm wanted to ensure the integrity of all network operations and, in doing so, installed a Category 6 cabling solution from Berk-Tek and Ortronics/Legrand, tailored to fit PerkinElmer's data center environment and budget. As a result, the company created a somewhat "virtual" and "cool" data center responsible for its expanded IP-based networking system, which controls data, voice, security and power-distribution services.

The design is a small footprint--1,500 square feet--yet large in capabilities, providing for a storage-area network (SAN) and Web hosting, as well as all financial transactions for North America. Because of the size, cost and aesthetics, the design team of RDK Engineers came up with a unique scenario.

"The main concern in the design of most data centers is to maintain low temperatures and proper airflow to ensure reliability of the cabling and associated hardware, which is customarily achieved through a raised-floor environment," says Barry Poitras of RDK. "However, PerkinElmer wanted to alternatively create airflow from the ceiling down."

CONSOLIDATED DATA CENTER

"Air conditioning in the under-floor plenum spaces and ramps added costs that we did not want to incur and felt that with a creative design from RDK and product selection, we could achieve our objectives," adds French. "As a result, the installed hardware-including legacy and new active equipment and a redundant cabling infrastructure-together with a software package that maximizes our server capability, resulted in a highly consolidated, highly used, efficient data center."

To house the LAN and SAN active equipment and cabling termination within the data center, which also incorporates the main telecom room and one of the IDFs, two rows of 10 cabinets each were set up in a hot/cold aisle scenario, as recommended by TIA-942, a standard for data centers. To further aid in the cooling, all the cabinet doors are perforated and the intercabinet cabling runs above the cabinets in elevated Wiremold "L" series trays. In addition, the intercabinet cable layout includes Ortronics angled Clarity 6 patch panels, as well as standard patch panels mounted vertically along with the cable-management solution.

The fiber and copper cabling runs in two separate pathways within the data center and feeds three other telecom rooms. Berk-Tek's premise-distribution 62.5-micron indoor tight-buffer 12-strand fiber-optic cable was selected as the backbone and for interconnection between the Ortronics FC Series fiber cabinets in the data center.

"This fiber-optic cable was selected because we were utilizing existing legacy Cisco 6509 switches," explains Poitras. "Since the distances within the data center did not exceed 50 feet, this cable has the capability to run the existing Fibre Channel protocol within the data center, as well as being able to handle the increased bandwidth required for future 10-Gigabit Ethernet applications. Whereas most new construction sites are selecting the 50-micron fiber, it didn't make sense here, especially with potential signal loss due to the additional fiber patch cords needed to correspond with the legacy switches."

"There were approximately 600 fiber connections in the data center alone, which were field terminated with high-density Ortronics LC connectors," says Randall Rossetti, president of Innovative Cabling Systems, the installation company. All the fiber-optic cable was terminated into the locked fiber cabinets located within the data center cabinets and in racks in the IDFs.