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Comment on Is there a practical reason data centers have to sprawl outward instead of upward?
Shadow@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
Weight. If you load a 42u rack up with 30lb servers you’re at 1280lbs spread out over about 4sqft, which is over the floor loading limit for most buildings. It’s much cheaper to support the weight in a wider building compared to a taller one.
foggy@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Shadow@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
I’ve built out 7 datacenters across 3 countries in my career. I’ve gotten a panicked call from Bell Canada when they realized our deployment density in an older facility, then had to work with them to provide weights of all of our cabinets. Sure though, all armchair nonsense. What’s your background?
30 seconds searching will back me up. digitalrealty.com/…/what-floor-loading-capacity-d…
foggy@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
[deleted]Shadow@lemmy.ca 5 hours ago
You started off with an ad hominem attack calling it armchair nonsense, that the weight argument has no merit. I’m pointing out i have actual experience in this area. If you hadn’t been an asshole with your initial reply I wouldn’t have bothered replying, instead here we are.
Everything is a money problem when you get down to it far enough. Why don’t we have mars colonies? Money. Why don’t cars fly? Money. Why doesn’t everyone live in super tall towers that touch the atmosphere? Money. Sure let’s just ignore all the engineering considerations and reduce it down to the absolute basic explanation of “money” so that nobody in this thread will learn anything.
Why don’t we have super tall datacenters? It’s not worth the money to sustain that level of weight in a new tower, and definitely not worth it to overhaul an existing tower.
It’s pointless to call out money as the limit, that’s completely obvious.
Anyways I’m over this thread, byeeeee.
jj4211@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
But the reason for the expense is largely the weight.
Yes we can at great expense support massive weights. But even in skyscrapers, you aren’t expecting to just cram every floor with equipment that weighs over a ton and supported by less than a square meter of floor.
It’s not just armchair engineering, i work in the industry and commonly you have racks preferring the ground floor and weight restrictions going up and even marked paths that the racks need to stay on when on upper floors due to limitations of the reinforcements.
Skyscrapers are largely impractical structures done for the sake of showing off, with any value based on keeping people close to each other. No one builds a skyscraper by itself miles from anything else. This is where they build the datacenters because they don’t need proximity.
IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
20 years ago I worked on the top floor of a 5 story office building. We wanted to build out a server room with a pretty hefty UPS for backup. The amount of steel reinforcement we had to install in the ceiling of the 4th floor was pretty insane…