[AusNOG] Data Suburb

[Bob Purdon]

> Unless its *very* modular and you can totally turn off the bits you are
> not using

Which is the idea, and you absolutely can do that.  Of course the size 
of the facility will dictate the granularity with which that can be 
done.  You add infrastructure as you need it.

> then you simply can't expect a half used facility to have the
> same efficiency as a fully utilised one half the size.

To a degree you can - just depends on what plant you have installed in 
the 50% capacity configuration, and where it's sitting in it's 
efficiency curve.

> analogy modern V8s have cylinder deactivation that saves some of the
> overhead, but they still waste energy spinning a few extra cranks and
> pistons about that they don't need 99% of the time.

The load in a datacentre doesn't change anywhere near as often as the 
load on a car engine.

The overall point is that just because you're building a datacentre with 
a 10MW ultimate load, doesn't mean you need 10MW of UPS and 10MW of 
cooling on day-1.  Build the infrastructure to allow for that, but 
install it in a modular fashion.