We had planned the replacement of our 2017 server estate properly. Sizing done, quotations in, a business case approved in November, delivery slots held with the supplier for March. Then our facilities manager sent me a short note asking what the new equipment would draw, and the project effectively stopped there.
The kit we had chosen is denser than what it replaces, which is the entire point of buying it. Each new chassis wants a little over two kilowatts against about nine hundred watts for the machines going out. Fewer boxes, far more heat per square metre, and a total draw rising from around thirty four kilowatts to fifty one.
The two rooms we occupy in this building are supplied with forty. That figure is in the lease, along with the fact that there is no mechanism in the lease to increase it. A new supply means the landlord's consent, a distribution board, the street, a six figure sum and most of a year. The cooling told the same story from a different direction, since both units are sized for the load we have and the supplier quoted fourteen weeks for anything larger.
Nobody in my department had a number for any of this. We track processors, memory, storage, licences, warranty end dates and rack units, in detail, in a tool we pay for. Electricity and floor loading belong to facilities, who are not invited to our planning sessions and had never been asked, and so our capacity plan measured every quantity except the two that were actually finite.
About sixty percent of that refresh went to a provider instead, which I presented as a strategic decision and which was in truth the cheapest available way of not buying electricity.
The better outcome came from a conversation we should have had years earlier. The property team intends to give up that floor when the break clause falls due, which was news to me, and my department had been sizing a five year hardware cycle inside a building we will not have.
Every infrastructure proposal now carries power, heat and floor loading, signed by facilities before it reaches the committee.
– Serguey Shinder
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