- Welcome to Crosstalk Solutions.
My name's Chris, and
recently we setup the network
for a massive cryptocurrency data center
at an undisclosed location in Georgia.
Our own David Barger was on site,
and worked with Tim Barbir
from North Georgia Data
to configure the network
for this building.
Now the network was just one
small piece of the puzzle,
as we found out, and Tim was nice enough
to explain some of the unique requirements
for building a
cryptocurrency-specific data center.
Now, I will warn you,
doing impromptu filming
at an active data center without
proper microphones creates a lot of noise.
So I tried to fix that
as much as possible,
but this video is still pretty noisy.
Because of that, I had
subtitles created for the video,
which should help out a lot.
So turn those subtitles on now,
and enjoy a look at a
cryptocurrency data center
built by North Georgia Data.
(upbeat music)
- Hey, I'm David from Crosstalk Solutions,
and today we're out with
Tim from North Georgia Data.
We can here, initially,
to setup the network,
but I wanted to take a quick
video, kind of impromptu,
of some of the cool things
that are happening here.
So there's a lot of similarities between
a normal data center, and a
cryptocurrency data center.
And one of the big things here is power,
maybe Tim could talk a
little bit about that.
- Yeah, so in your traditional data center
you can have anywhere from
half a million to a million
square feet, depending on
the size of the data center.
And the unique part
about what we're doing is
we have a 45 hundred square foot facility
that, when it's all said and done,
will have a little over
10 megawatts of power.
And so to give you an idea,
10 megawatts of power
is enough power to run
over 10 thousand full-sized homes.
So it's a lot of power crammed
in a really small space,
and that's also the reason why we need
all this fancy equipment
that you can see behind us.
The unique part in what we
do is that we are delivered
480 volt power from the power company,
and we step that down just
a little bit to 415 volts,
and the reason why we do that is because
running and distributing 415-volt
power in the data center,
costs us less, and is
dramatically more efficient
on the end of the equipment.
So we can usually see anywhere
between two and three percent
savings in running that higher voltage,
as opposed to running something
lower like 208 three phase,
which a lot of traditional
data centers use.
- Yeah, so one of the
things I've been noticing
with this data center here is we're trying
to squeeze efficiency out of everything.
I mean, look at everything
on top of this building here,
the type of airflow system we have.
We're gonna take a look
inside in just a minute here
of how that all works, but needless to say
it's one heck of a system.
- (laughs) Yeah, so one
of the unique things
about the airflow system that we have,
well it's a unique thing
because of the unique
problem that we have,
so because we have such
a concentrated amount of
power per square foot,
the equipment that we run in
there generates a ton of heat.
And this is one of the challenges that all
cryptocurrency-focused data centers have,
and we've been able to
overcome that challenge
by pumping over a million and a half CFM
of air through this facility.
And so this solves a lot of problems
that a lot of other facilities have,
and we've successfully overcome that
by just moving a ton of air.
(door banging)
- [David] All right Tim,
this doesn't look like
a normal data center,
it looks like we're in
a shipping container,
can you explain that?
- Yeah, I sure can.
So with this type of a build,
we have unique requirements
that are put on us by our customer,
and also by the hardware providers.
And so after a lot of time planning,
engineering, and architecting,
we just discovered that
repurposing shipping containers,
that are a dime a dozen,
solved two problems for us.
And one was construction time.
We were able to drastically
reduce the time that it takes
to stand up a unique facility like this
by using widely available
shipping containers.
And also, secondly, it was able to
save us quite a bit of money.
From using standard framed walls,
and floor systems, that
can get very, very costly.
- So the other thing is that stands out,
this isn't a normal network rack setup.
- No, it's definitely not.
And that's another one of the differences
between a traditional data
center and what we're doing.
So the equipment that we
receive is not rack-friendly.
There are adapters to be
able to adapt it into a rack,
but just due to the unique nature
of the equipment, we had to adapt.
And so that's why we've developed our own
100% custom shelving
system, that is able to fit
just about any cryptocurrency-focused
device on the market.
- And it looks like your rack
is specifically designed for airflow.
Like everything here is
thought in mind of cooling.
Can you explain how the
airflow system works
in this pod here?
- Absolutely.
So as I mentioned
previously, in the facility
we have about a million and a half CFM
running through the entire building.
And so in this pod, this pod is connected
to those big
smoke-stack-fan-looking-things
that are on the roof, and
so what we were able to do,
we were able to setup our racking in a way
to where the path of least
resistance, naturally,
is running through the machines.
And that does two things.
It insures that the machines stay cool,
and it basically eliminates
the possibility of hot pockets.
And so this is one of the
key issues that a lot of
crypto-focused data centers run into
is how do we avoid having
hot pockets in the facility?
And this is how we've done it,
and it's working great so far.
- So the main reason I'm
here is for the network.
A few months ago we talked
about a few requirements
for this data center, do
you mind discussing those?
- Sure, so in any
crypto-focused data center
you really have two main requirements.
That's reliable power
and a reliable network.
So when I initially sat down with David,
I told him "Listen, I need three things.
"I need something that's cost effective,
"I need something that's reliable,
"and I need something that
has excellent uptime."
And so after evaluating
all the different options,
we collectively decided
that Ubiquiti's EdgeMax line
was gonna be a great fit for us.
And so far it's been awesome.
- Well, some of the more
technical aspects of the network
include setting up VRP routers,
so that if a router happens to die,
the other one just kicks in immediately
and starts taking its place.
Of course, we have
multiple WAN connections.
Something special about
the WAN connections
for a crypto center is, most of all,
the connections are going out.
With a typical data
center, you have a lot of
special rules for things that come in.
Because something like Voltore or AWS,
they gotta get their clients access
to a whole bunch of stuff inside.
Where here, all of the connections
are originating from inside, going out.
So one of the benefits of
selecting EdgeMax was UNMS.
That made managing the network very easy,
as well as helping you out, right?
- Yeah, it absolutely does.
UNMS has a wonderful interface,
it's very similar to the
UniFi interface, right?
And one of the challenges that you have
in a facility like this
is the number of posts.
I mean, when we are done with phase two
we'll have close to eight thousand or so
networked and active devices inside here.
So having really good
visibility into the network,
what's connected, where it's connected,
what VLAN it's on, et cetera,
et cetera, is very important.
Especially from the
perspective that we need to
make it easy to find for employees
that we have here on site.
So having UNMS, being able to
setup multiple user profiles,
different restrictions,
and just being able to find
different cryptocurrency
miners in the facility,
UNMS just makes it a whole
heck of a lot easier.
- Yeah, so it also makes scaling
in the future easy for my end.
Whenever he needs to have more switches
or anything like that,
we just ship them to you,
and you plug them in, give me a call,
and I make sure everything's
working all right.
I think some of you guys might
have saw on Chris' Twitter
the big box of all the
switches, that was weird.
Lots of work, but it
came very easy to manage.
Think our lives would have been easier.
But that's pretty much it for the network,
taking a high-level overview of it.
Thanks, Tim.
We appreciate you letting
us film a little bit here,
learning a little bit more.
- Absolutely.
- How do we find info about you?
- Yeah, so the best way
to find out more about us,
or get in touch with us, is our website at
www.northgeorgiadata.com.
- All right, thank you.
- All right.
(upbeat music)
