But to answer your question you can get pretty close by translating into units of watts and remembering a couple of simple rules.
Rule one is you only use 80% of the provisioned power (this is a safety rule with respect to things like circuit breakers and infrastructure, it keeps random surge events from destroying everything).
Rule two is that your power use efficiency (PUE) ratio determines how much cooling you need.
So lets say your PUE was 1.3 (that means total power / computer power = 1.3, the extra going into cooling) and you were building a 10 Megawatt data center. Well you have 8 Megawatts of actual power (80%) and 8/1.3 or 6.15 Megawatts for machines. Going by 750 watts per server (the PSU label [1]) you can put 6.15/.00075 = 8,200 servers into that data center. At 500 watts/machine you are 12,300 machines. So to make the math easy lets say it is 10,000 machines.
If you servers cost you $5,000 each then you're at $50M in server hardware for a 10MW install. Network switches are $100/port (assuming you're not doing 10G ports) and cable is way more expensive than it should be adding another $20 per port to connect it to the switch, so another $1.2M there. You need to hold them in something and rack solutions go from the less expensive (4 post) to the more expensive (fully enclosed) with a range of $500 - $2500. How many you can put in a rack will change your per machine rack cost up or down, but its somewhere between $25 - $125 per machine so another $1.2M so lets be generous and say our $55M for your 10,000 machines which are going to consume 8MW of your 10MW provisioned power.
Building the data center though, especially if you include land acquisition, that is going to be pricey (of course you can write it off over 27.5 years but still) If we start with the fact that a data center is really just a big warehouse with a cold box inside, we can look at building a warehouse [2] and some folks have some priced out [3] which put it about $50 - $75M range, and that is before you add cooling, back up generators, and pay the local utility to run a 10MW power line into your building. I got some estimates from Crane for a 'pocket' data center project I was looking at (about 3MW) and those extra costs are probably going to exceed $100M (split 33/33/33 into cooling, back up power, and secondary construction).
So back of the envelope 3:1 construction costs over equipment cost. And maybe $20M per constructed MW of compute.
[1] This isn't what you would do since machines don't consume that much, they can only not consume more than that, but whatever.
I don't know of any off the shelf ones, but there are "data centers" like Google and Microsoft and Amazon build for their "gear" which they resell as "services", and there are "data centers" which are built by Real Estate Investment Trusts which are designed for 'unknown' gear and 'unknown' services.
It is more expensive to build the latter since you cannot know ahead of time what gear to support. Whereas if you're building a box full of Open Compute servers you're in a much better space.
The "services" data centers are really much closer to building sized servers than they are hosting facilities for rack mount servers.
I expect like other specialized facilities part of the 'value add' as a construction agent is both procedural generation tools and experience with various cost trade offs which really only comes from building several of them.
Comments
Yes, and they aren't particularly relative :-)
But to answer your question you can get pretty close by translating into units of watts and remembering a couple of simple rules.
Rule one is you only use 80% of the provisioned power (this is a safety rule with respect to things like circuit breakers and infrastructure, it keeps random surge events from destroying everything).
Rule two is that your power use efficiency (PUE) ratio determines how much cooling you need.
So lets say your PUE was 1.3 (that means total power / computer power = 1.3, the extra going into cooling) and you were building a 10 Megawatt data center. Well you have 8 Megawatts of actual power (80%) and 8/1.3 or 6.15 Megawatts for machines. Going by 750 watts per server (the PSU label [1]) you can put 6.15/.00075 = 8,200 servers into that data center. At 500 watts/machine you are 12,300 machines. So to make the math easy lets say it is 10,000 machines.
If you servers cost you $5,000 each then you're at $50M in server hardware for a 10MW install. Network switches are $100/port (assuming you're not doing 10G ports) and cable is way more expensive than it should be adding another $20 per port to connect it to the switch, so another $1.2M there. You need to hold them in something and rack solutions go from the less expensive (4 post) to the more expensive (fully enclosed) with a range of $500 - $2500. How many you can put in a rack will change your per machine rack cost up or down, but its somewhere between $25 - $125 per machine so another $1.2M so lets be generous and say our $55M for your 10,000 machines which are going to consume 8MW of your 10MW provisioned power.
Building the data center though, especially if you include land acquisition, that is going to be pricey (of course you can write it off over 27.5 years but still) If we start with the fact that a data center is really just a big warehouse with a cold box inside, we can look at building a warehouse [2] and some folks have some priced out [3] which put it about $50 - $75M range, and that is before you add cooling, back up generators, and pay the local utility to run a 10MW power line into your building. I got some estimates from Crane for a 'pocket' data center project I was looking at (about 3MW) and those extra costs are probably going to exceed $100M (split 33/33/33 into cooling, back up power, and secondary construction).
So back of the envelope 3:1 construction costs over equipment cost. And maybe $20M per constructed MW of compute.
[1] This isn't what you would do since machines don't consume that much, they can only not consume more than that, but whatever.
[2] http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/rsmeans/models/warehouse...
[3] http://www.mohavedevelopment.org/media/docs/One%20Sheets/Moh...
Thanks for the informative post. Are you aware of any non-proprietary tools for doing procedural generation of data-centers?
I'm imagining a generate-and-test cycle given estimates for the various component prices.
I don't know of any off the shelf ones, but there are "data centers" like Google and Microsoft and Amazon build for their "gear" which they resell as "services", and there are "data centers" which are built by Real Estate Investment Trusts which are designed for 'unknown' gear and 'unknown' services.
It is more expensive to build the latter since you cannot know ahead of time what gear to support. Whereas if you're building a box full of Open Compute servers you're in a much better space.
The "services" data centers are really much closer to building sized servers than they are hosting facilities for rack mount servers.
I expect like other specialized facilities part of the 'value add' as a construction agent is both procedural generation tools and experience with various cost trade offs which really only comes from building several of them.