Yahoo takes a page from Google’s datacenters

Unlike Facebook, who has spearheaded the Open Compute initiative, where they have made public the designs that they are using for the datacenter IT and rack equipment, Google has played their equipment cards much closer to their vest. Information about the equipment in their facilities has been derived from talks that have been given at conferences and such, but there has been little in the way of “look at what we’ve built” that digs into the details of the Google datacenter IT load equipment.

One thing that has come to light is that rather than datacenter –wide battery backup systems, Google has incorporated batteries into their standard datacenter servers, allowing for brief periods of power outage to the servers to be addressed without the need for standard UPS systems. This reduces both cost and complexity in datacenter deployments.

Yahoo Japan, who since 2011 has been trialing the construction of  low-cost, energy efficient datacenters for the Asian portal to the Yahoo infrastructure, recently partnered with Fujitsu Corporation to deploy 200 of Fujitsu’s Primergy RX200 S7 server configured with a built-in battery backup system. Along with the battery backup, Yahoo is taking advantage of the server’s ability to run in higher temperature environment.

The new datacenters are prefabricated structures with a minimum of networking and cooling equipment, making use of free air cooling and fan systems to maintain a flow of fresh, cooler air through the facility. The use of the Primergy servers with battery backup further simplifies the requirements for the datacenter structures. Fujitsu has stated that the prefab datacenters are roughly 60% cheaper to operate in cost per megawatt. They have further claimed a PUE of 1.044 for these datacenters, an excellent result for any datacenter.

These battery backed up servers are currently available only in Japan; as such, the details published so far are available only to those that can read Japanese, here.