Emerson examines everything

ST. LOUIS -- Steve Hassell, CIO at global technology and engineering giant Emerson, is only half joking when he suggests that before his career is over the data center will comprise one rack sitting in the middle of a white room.

The new green: Data centers go au naturale

Who knows what the future will bring for the data center, given how amazingly fast the speeds and feeds are changing, he says.

As an example, Hassell points to Emerson's experience planning, building and populating the 35,000-square-foot data center the company opened two months ago on its St. Louis headquarters campus. This facility, which will host all Emerson business applications when fully operational, will be one of four global data centers the company has planned in a massive consolidation from 135 data centers of varying sizes.

When Emerson began building the data center early last year, it did so with the expectation that the facility would meet the company's needs for 10 years, and possibly, some thought, a few years beyond that, Hassell says. Even the more aggressive forecasts quickly became dated.

"Now, because of the technology shifts happening while we were building the data center," he says, "we feel we will not be space-constrained for the life of the facility. We think we'll make it to 20 years pretty easily."

The IT inside

That the data center's expected lifespan has doubled has much to do with IT's "ruthless standardization" of the server infrastructure, Hassell says. In the St. Louis data center, Emerson has standardized on Sun Unix servers and Dell x86servers. Using VMware virtual machines, Emerson expects to hit no less than an 18-to-1 consolidation ratio, he adds.

"We tried to future-proof the data center as much as possible as we deal with an industry for which the technology horizon changes every three to five years," Hassell says.

Toward that end, the company made an early bet on Intel's next-generation Nehalem processor.

"We specifically chose to go with Nehalem because of the chip's energy efficiency and because it can access memory more efficiently and allow us to reduce our footprint even more than possible with the 18-to-1 server reduction," Hassell says. "The Nehalem chip, by being so powerful, efficient and scalable, allows us to reduce our footprint by 50% more."

For the network infrastructure, a focus on the future had Emerson shunning copper wiring. Instead, it uses fiber to interconnect its Cisco Catalyst-based architecture.

"You can argue that that gives us only marginal benefits today, but now we're set up for future expandability. Scaling up from a speed standpoint and expanding out from rack standpoint will be much easier now because we're already fiber-connected everywhere," he explains.

The coolest of cooling

Copper has taken a hit outside the IT aisles, too.

Thinking outside the box, the company took an unusual approach to the cooling infrastructure -- eliminating the need for 2.5 miles of copper piping, Hassell says.

In a traditional data center, the heat exchangers needed for the air conditioning system are placed in an outside yard. Copper pipes, buried underground, connect the two. Because the pipes are buried, a company must account for maximum capacity from the get-go; while it can add heat exchangers as needed, it has to live with whatever conduit it has buried between the data center and the yard.