Average power per rack in your DC
 

Hello,

our company is about to build a new commercial DC (our first). One of the potential general contractors is claiming that a realistic load per rack in a commercial DC is only about 2 kW/rack.

To my knowledge, 2 kW/rack average was back in 2009. Right now we're somewhere around 4-5 kW/rack, right?

Could you please share what is the average power load per rack in your DC's?

Thank you.

JT

This number will vary a lot among data centers. In our university environment, we have sites between 2 and 20 kW/rack, depending on the location and the type of equipment. My advice is to use your own best information to install reasonable space, power and cooling capacities at the start and have a solid plan for increasing capacity in case you run out. Remember, unfinished spaces and pathways (conduits, ducts) are cheap and easy to install during new construction and easy to grow into once the data center is operational. Remodeling a live data center is expensive and disruptive.

Certainly there are many experienced designers available to help you with this and other capacity planning issues -- see http://www.datacentertalk.com/catego...sign-services/.

Ken

Hello Ken,

thank you for your reply. The situation is following. I have two price quotes, one offering 30% of IT power more the other one for the same price. This means 30% difference in potential sales which clearly means a 30% of revenue difference once the DC is full. Our company owner was told by the company with the smaller solution, that we cannot fit that many racks in our DC because the average load in a commercial DC is 2 kW/rack and we would need double the space of our IT room.

All I need is to shut them up clearly. So that's why I'm asking what do people have on average in the real world.

JT

The power consumption of each rack can vary a lot with the load. Usually about 20kW, but it can go up to 40kW on peak load. 40kW for racks with load bearing larger capacity. It also depends on the cooling, ~40kW with no adequate cooling is a dangerous issue.