When I was a kid, my living room often served as a “job site” where I managed a fleet of construction vehicles. Scaled-down versions of cranes, dump trucks, bulldozers and tractor-trailers littered the floor, and I oversaw the construction (and subsequent destruction) of some pretty monumental projects. Fast-forward a few years (or decades), and not much has changed except that the “heavy machinery” has gotten a lot heavier, and I’m a lot less inclined to “destruct.” As SoftLayer’s vice president of facilities, part of my job is to coordinate the early logistics of our data center expansions, and as it turns out, that responsibility often involves overseeing some of the big rigs that my parents tripped over in my youth.
The video below documents the installation of a new Cummins two-megawatt diesel generator for a pod in our DAL05 data center. You see the crane prepare for the work by installing counter-balance weights, and work starts with the team placing a utility transformer on its pad outside our generator yard. A truck pulls up with the generator base in tow, and you watch the base get positioned and lowered into place. The base looks so large because it also serves as the generator’s 4,000 gallon “belly” fuel tank. After the base is installed, the generator is trucked in, and it is delicately picked up, moved, lined up and lowered onto its base. The last step you see is the generator housing being installed over the generator to protect it from the elements. At this point, the actual “installation” is far from over — we need to hook everything up and test it — but those steps don’t involve the nostalgia-inducing heavy machinery you probably came to this post to see:
When we talk about the “megawatt” capacity of a generator, we’re talking about the bandwidth of power available for use when the generator is operating at full capacity. One megawatt is one million watts, so a two-megawatts generator could power 20,000 100-watt light bulbs at the same time. This power can be sustained for as long as the generator has fuel, and we have service level agreements to keep us at the front of the line to get more fuel when we need it. Here are a few other interesting use-cases that could be powered by a two-megawatt generator:
- 1,000 Average Homes During Mild Weather
- 400 Homes During Extreme Weather
- 20 Fast Food Restaurants
- 3 Large Retail Stores
- 2.5 Grocery Stores
- A SoftLayer Data Center Pod Full of Servers (Most Important Example!)
Every SoftLayer facility has an n+1 power architecture. If we need three generators to provide power for three data center pods in one location, we’ll install four. This additional capacity allows us to balance the load on generators when they’re in use, and we can take individual generators offline for maintenance without jeopardizing our ability to support the power load for all of the facility’s data center pods.
Those of you who are in the fondly remember Tonka trucks and CAT crane toys are the true target audience for this post, but even if you weren’t big into construction toys when you were growing up, you’ll probably still appreciate the work we put into safeguarding our facilities from a power perspective. You don’t often see the “outside the data center” work that goes into putting a new SoftLayer data center pod online, so I thought it’d give you a glimpse. Are there an topics from an operations or facilities perspectives that you also want to see?
-Robert
