Quote:
Originally Posted by docalton
Building a datacenter involves so many things.
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...understatement of the week (so far)...
Quote:
Originally Posted by docalton
Most of the other questions have been answered, but a "U" as in 1U or 2U is a measurment of the height of a rack mounted piece of equipment. 1U is like 1.5In I believe. A typical rack is 19In (between mounting rails) wide and height can vary from short to tall.
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This article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19-inch_rack
give 1 U as 1.75". But the critical point is that these things are modular. So, mechanically, you can treat this stuff like Lego (kiddies building bricks, if that's an obscure cultural reference), provided that you obey the rules.
So, if you are in charge of the information infrastructure, you can commit to a particular combination of computational servers and data storage equipment, and in, say, two year's time when your organisation's needs have changed and the technology on offer has also changed (server consolidation and data storage densities) you plug in new modules to the existing server infrastructure.
You can see how that would be more appealing to the CIO. Rather than going to the CFO and saying "you know that expensive equipment we put in 2 years ago, and that we are writing down over 5 years, well we have scrap it all and buy a complete new set of expensive kit" you would be saying "due to increased requirements, we need to upgrade the servers within the existing infrastructure".
Given that it is difficult to look out much more than 6 months or so in the availability of technology and while you probably predict your data and computation requirements a bit further out (although things like green initiatives coming down from on high can blindside you), you can see that you are looking at the future through a rather murky glass. In this context, the modular approach is very attractive.
Of course, this is only important if you are intending to keep your job
For servers, the most usual form factors are 1U ('pizza box') and 3U (a series of 'blades' in a sub-rack). In extremis, theoretically the blade server form-factor can achieve the better computational density, but that's not always the key requirement.