Yahoo's data center chief draws lessons from century-old tech

Computerworld - LAS VEGAS - When he was in Buffalo, N.Y. looking for a data center site, Scott Noteboom, vice president of global production operations, at Yahoo Inc. said the first thing he wanted to see were old factory buildings. He wanted to learn how the factories used the cool air coming off the Great Lakes in an era before refrigeration.

That is how Noteboom thinks. He looks at what he is doing -- designing and operating data centers for one of the world's largest Internet-based companies -- through the perspective of history. And from this love of history, he has realized something about the future of data centers.

Some people may view old factory buildings as blight, but Noteboom sees the legacy of distant colleagues working through the problem of maximizing cooling without refrigeration. To illustrate his point, he showed a photo of an aluminum smelting plant, with two rows of buildings and a chimney and furnace between them. The designers "had to manage temperature in that building without using any cooling," said Noteboom, "and they were using a dense heat source in the middle creating a chimney effect" to evacuate the heat.

"That velocity of air would pull in outside air from the sides to allow the building to breath," he told attendees at the Afcom data center conference here. "You can learn a lot of lessons from those past factories."

Yahoo applied those lessons to its recently completed Lockport data center in upstate New York. It relies on outside air, eliminating the need for big and costly chiller systems.

That move was also possible because Noteboom was willing to think beyond the expected, such as the recommended hardware temperature and humidity ranges established by the American Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).

Noteboom believed that hardware could perform outside the recommended humidity ranges without failing.

"How many computers have you had fail in your house because of humidity?" said Noteboom.

Noteboom researched the issue back to the 1950s, and believed the humidity recommendations arose initially from the use of paper in data centers, specifically the use of punch cards, which changed density depending on the humidity. Noteboom then applied what he calls "Hillbilly math."

"You just have a good gut instinct that you just learn from being in the swamps ... you go with it because you know it's the right thing to do," he said. It is a decision that also benefited from work in Yahoo's San Jose facility, which involved testing servers at 130 degrees and spraying mist on them to see where condensation formed. The U.S. Department of Energy recently gave Yahoo a $10 million innovation grant to help it with its research.