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In Pictures: AMD Consolidates From 18 Datacenters To Just Two
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1. Inside The Main Office

Back in March, AMD invited Tom's Hardware to visit its new datacenter in Suwanee, Georgia. We were accompanied by Corporate Vice President and CIO Jake Dominguez, Corporate Vice President of Global Infrastructures & Operations Andy Bynum, and Director of Server Software Planning Margaret Lewis. I published my experience at the datacenter in early April. However, I came away with so many other interesting photos to share. Follow along as we tour AMD's new facility, designed to cut costs and improve the company's efficiency.

In this shot, we're in the main office, which provides a building management system for monitoring HVAC capacity, available wattage, and so on. There's also software in place for viewing the status of the generators and switchgears. 

2. Keeping Tabs On Power

Green is good. Everything you see on-screen is running normally. The three indicators up top are 2 MW generators. Additionally, a small life safety generator is rated for 300 kW.

3. Tape-Based Storage

Already, the datacenter's tape-based storage capacity is approaching five petabytes.

4. Making Sure Everything Is Alright

These servers were shipped in from Austin, Texas, and are undergoing testing to make sure they weren't damaged on the trip before going into a data hall.

5. Server Consolidation Saves Money

AMD performed an IT refresh before moving facilities, reducing the power requirement and needed space of its equipment by up to 50 percent. As an example, the company replaced four racks of four-year-old equipment with one rack of modern gear.

6. Hey Enthusiasts, Jealous?

Check out that cable management.

7. Room To Grow

AMD plans to fill all of this space with data halls. Currently, only two data halls are in the building.

8. Power For Emergencies

Each data hall has its own backup generator.

9. If You Can't Stand The Heat...

'

Notice the plastic curtain on the end of each row? That's the keep heat from leaking out. Instead, it's sucked up into the ceiling.

10. Making The Move

This datacenter is the product of AMD's mission to reduce costs, increase productivity, and improve efficiency. The company introduced its Data Center Consolidation (DCC) plan back in November 2012, which included moving much of its IT infrastructure from Austin, Texas to the Suwanee location.

11. Putting The Pieces Together

AMD was able to sell the Austin campus and lease the Georgia-based building for a number of years. This arm of the consolidation plan concluded in September 2013, providing $8.5 million in annual savings.

12. AMD's Datacenter, Powered By...AMD

This data center employs HP and Dell hardware with, naturally, AMD Opteron CPUs inside.

13. Bringing It All Under Two Roofs

The ultimate goal, AMD states, is to consolidate its 18 datacenter facilities spread out across the globe down to two by 2015: Suwanee, Georgia and Cyberjaya, Malaysia. The company already virtualized 90 percent of its corporate datacenter environment, allowing AMD to decommission 75 percent of the physical and 72 percent of the virtual servers.

14. More Performance In Less Space

At the same time, rack space was compressed by 45 percent. More specifically, AMD went from 289 racks in Austin to 160 racks in Suwanee, bringing power consumption down from 2.8 MW to 1.2 MW. According to representatives, projects that previously took weeks are now done in days.

15. That's A Lot Of CPUs...

The IT refresh in Austin included replacing single- and dual-core 1P servers with more than 140 dual- and quad-socket blades with 16-core CPUs and 256 GB of memory. Installed processors include the Opteron 6136, 6174, 6176, 6204, 6220, 6238, 6272, 6274, 6276, 6282 SE, and Opteron 2435, 6380, and 8389.

16. Ready For Anything

The new datacenter is a Tier 3 design, meaning, most important, that its expected availability is 99.982% or higher. It sports redundant power, cooling, and networking. AMD's Suwanee center also has 36 to 48 hours of backup fuel capacity for diesel generators and on-premise chilled water storage.

17. Plenty Of Room To Grow

The datacenter's two data halls total approximately 6000 square feet IT space, supporting 204 racks of equipment. IT power is 2 MW, but expandable to 10 MW through "modular construction methodology".

18. Putting Work In

This datacenter also processes 23 million jobs per month; more than 31,000 jobs are completed per hour.

19. Cooling With Water

Right now there is only one room with three chillers, but AMD expects to expand this to four chiller rooms as the need for data halls grows. Only water is used for cooling.

20. Keeping It Simple(r)

The company also uses a higher chilled water temperature, which requires less infrastructure and, according to the company, higher input temperature than a typical enterprise datacenter.

21. Redundancy Is Key

This is the data center's backup in case the chillers go offline.

22. An Emphasis On Staying Modern

AMD's Jake Dominguez said that refreshing its technology is one key thread the company is working on. "As like any other company, over time our assets have been aging. Andy joined us last year and he's really focused on revamping the infrastructure and we've got this concept now within AMD where every year at a minimum we're going to refresh a certain percentage of the technology and hopefully in a rhythm where every four or five years we refresh and recycle."