The Datacenter Project

Project Concluded:   Septmber 02, 2022

DB Reference:   dc2022

Last Updated:   September 26, 2023

adobe datacenter

Introduction

While hosting and testing my own services might be exciting, dealing with physical server might not be a pleasant story. Physical servers are heavy, energy-consuming, require air conditioning, and especially noise. It is no longer viable to simply have one room for the servers in the apartment as the number of servers increases rapidly. Based on a saparate little house in the yard, a standalone mini datacenter project is then proposed.

In this project, I have built my own data center from an empty room. This includes painting the wall, cabling, planning and deploying electricity equipment, air conditioning, migrating existing servers, designing the software architecture, deploying security systems, and more. For the majority of these areas, I undertook self-directed learning from scratch, leveraging online resources. All independently.

Due to external factors(my datacenter is part of the entire yard), there is more to consider than just the datacenter. The tools, calculations, constructions that outside of the datacenter's scope is not disscussed here. These factors, however, did affect the outcomes while making decisions for the dataceter.

Goal

This project seeks to establish a dedicated server room equipped with ample electrical capacity, robust air conditioning/ventilation, stringent security, and a high-speed network for all servers. Concurrently, the hardware and software architecture should be sufficiently advanced to accommodate long-term demands.

Components

As of September 2023, the project has the following components:

Each component is relatively a small project. To avoid overflow our visitor's browser, I have created separated pages for them.

Physical Components

  • Layout design: a control room and a server room.
  • Cooling: a ventilation and A/C system.
  • Power: electricity and redundency.
  • Security: controlled access & surveillance & enhanced wall
  • Interior: electrostatic floor and others

Software & Structure

  • High-performance 40G local network
  • Hybrid storage system
  • Hypervisors
  • Computing & data servers

Detailed Description

For each component listed above, a thorogh research and self study was conducted, followed by the purchase of equippment and installation. Some of the component relies on the result of other components, and I tried my best to reducing waiting between installation of each components by planning in advance. Despite that, this is still a long project taken over 6 months

Since the details of each component is too long to be fitted in a single page, I have divided each compoent into their own page:

For the principle behind how the control room and server room was designed, as well as the construction and external limitation, please refers to Layout design: a control room and a server room.

For the design and logic behind my energy-saving cooling system, as well as corresponding maths behind the scene, please refers to Cooling: a ventilation and A/C system.

For the details of power supply system and it's construction details, please refers to Power: electricity and redundency.

For how I handle the security problem while designing, pleasae refers to Security: Controlled access & Surveillance & enhanced wall.

For other basics of a datacenter, like the electrostatic floor, please refers to: Interior: Electrostatic floor and others.

For how the internal network was deployed, please refers to High-performance 40G local network.

For how and efficient storage cluster was deployed, please refers to Hybrid Storage Project.

For how our hypervisors were deployed, please refers to VMware Hypervirost Project.