Thread: Data Center Consolidation

Cadence designs CAD software for chip and PCB designing. They have a centralized server farm compute infrastructure. The usage of server ensures that the company is able to continuously innovate. This ensures that the company is able to run huge number of regressions on the products they make before releasing to customers, so that they can ensure quality. Before consolidation, the entire compute server infrastructure was scattered across 12 small computer rooms across three buildings in their Noida Campus. And a tremendous amount of effort was required to maintain and manage the scattered infrastructure which demanded the move to consolidate them into one large datacenter. The inefficiencies existed not just in maintaining the rooms but also in cooling, effective utilization, and the cost of creating minimum n+ 1 resiliency. Availability, scalability and performance were the main guiding prinipIes in their design. After deploying the new datacenter, it has given them 100% uptime since May 2007 and the energy efficiency or PUE (power usage effectiveness) of the datacenter is around 81 %. As far as scalability is concerned, the modular approach of the power backup solution has ensured that they did not have to commission entire UPS power backup capacity in the beginning. As the datacenter utilization goes up, they can accordingly add more UPS modules, thus reducing upfront capital cost and wastage of unused resources.

Plus the cooling is also taken care of very efficiently by using hot and cold aisle design. They are reducing the shot circuiting of cold air thrown by the AC and the hot air generated by the seivers. This has significantly reduced the cooling requirement and the company is able to set the ACs at a higher temperature (for saving power and cost), and at the same time able to derive the desired amount of cooling.