So far, 2020 is a very action-packed year for us. Several services are close to completion(WMS, WEDOS Cloud), others are being prepared for beta tests or are already being tested (WEDOS CD, WEDOS WebSite). It’s a good thing we recruited 5 new colleagues last year and will be adding more in February 🙂 However, we also moved forward with our third datacenter project. Since it will have sloping roofs and be in the countryside, we call it a “cowshed” 🙂
We revealed the intention to build Datacentre WEDOS 3 (DC3) in July 2019 in the article The near future or what awaits us now. Since then, we already have the official project documentation and by the end of February we want to have applied for all the necessary permits.
Why we need a third datacentre
We need WEDOS DC3 mainly as a space for disk storage and conventional servers. We still see the future in oil. Oil cooling makes sense both economically and environmentally. We don’t have to play green company. Servers are cooled incomparably more efficiently, and the heat generated is easily transported to somewhere where it can be used. In our case it is a municipal swimming pool, but it would not be a problem to heat the households for free. For datacentres, heat is a waste that must be disposed of as efficiently as possible.
However, not everything can be cooled with oil yet. Classic hard drives are a big problem. If they get oil in them, that’s it. Believe us, we have performed a number of experiments with fatal consequences for many hard drives. There are helium discs that work in oil, but we are looking for a comprehensive solution.
When we found oil to be a dead end for spinning disks, we opted for SSDs, which have gotten larger and larger in capacity every year. But there is a lot of interest in cheap data storage space. SSDs cannot (yet) meet these requirements. In addition, the price-performance ratio is not yet such.
Last year, the decision was made to purchase HPE Cloudline CL5800 Gen9 Server storage for our data and our customers’ data. We have a variant equipped with two Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPUs E5-2680 v4 with a frequency of 2.4 GHz. These are 14-core processors with 2 threads per core. So in total, the entire storage has 56 processor threads and a modest 512GB of RAM, but it can have up to 4x as much.
A total of 100 HDDs can be placed in this 4U storage unit. In our case, it will be 10 TB drives from Intel, which we have had very good experiences with. The capacity of one such repository will be 1 PB. You can also put 14 TB drives in there, but the price doesn’t work out so well. So you can put up to 10-14 PB of data in one rack, including switches. That’s density, huh 🙂 ?
According to the current demand, we plan to purchase several of these storage devices this year, which can still be accommodated by our DC1. But if dozens of them are needed, it will require the first datacenter in DC3…
WEDOS DC3 will be a multi-datacenter complex
In a previous article, we told you that DC3 would be multiple datacenters in one location. In total, the project envisages two buildings, as well as two administrative buildings and a storage hall for promotional items for customers and mainly for spare parts.
The buildings are almost 37 metres long, 13.5 metres wide and, with the exception of the warehouse, are two storeys high. Everything will be made of reinforced concrete.
Meanwhile, the office building is designed so that up to 170 people can work comfortably on each floor. For the time being, we don’t know if we will use the space completely or if we will rent out part of it to VIP customers.
We thought that maybe we could provide free offices to our affiliate partners. For some of them it’s already quite a good income, they have their own teams, and if they could sell 10 times more like that, we wouldn’t mind at all, on the contrary 🙂
Maybe we’ll offer it as a co-working center. Maybe we’ll offer it to some startups that we want to support.
In the datacentre building itself, we expect to use both floors for servers. A total of approximately 2x 400 square meters of server room alone in each building. There are no special modifications planned for now, but if any special solution is needed for the storage servers, it will not be a problem for us.
We have almost 11,000 sqm of land ready for the whole site, which is not only with sufficient electricity supply (there is HV at the corner of the site and we will have 2 own transformer stations). There are also fibre optic cables, the Cetin backbone network and ČD Telematika cables a little further away. There are also other utilities on the plot. Another advantage is the excellent transport accessibility, which will improve in the future. When it makes sense to use solar energy, we can use the area for this purpose…
Conclusion
This is what our DC3 looks like virtually so far. We have the project documentation ready. Today was the last meeting and we want to apply for all the permits and if everything goes according to plan, we will start construction soon. Ideally by summer. This time we plan to keep you informed and bring you up-to-date photos and videos directly from the construction.