Upgrades are in progress to the CSE 209 machine room to bring it up to the same standards of reliability as the SSRB facility. These upgrades include an efficient, floor-space-saving power grid, greater capacity, and redundant cooling and power. The upgrades are expected to be fully complete by mid-November.

The machine room located in the Computer Sciences and Engineering Building (CSE) has been reconfigured to allow more racks, equaling greater capacity for servers within the current space. Making this possible is a power grid on the ceiling, eliminating the need for snaking cables on or under the floor. This grid, highlighted in green in the photo below, allows machines to be "plugged" in at any point along the track. The difference is that there are no actual plugs, in the conventional sense. The grid can power as many racks as will fit. In addition, the interlocking dual-grid configuration allows for machines to be plugged into more than one grid at a time. This means that if one grid should fail, the power to the machine will not be interrupted.

The photo below shows the "old" power distribution unit (PDU) for this machine room.

The new UPS/PDU is capable of handling greater loads and balancing power needs more efficiently. The old one will remain in place, providing another level of redudancy for power. Not shown in this photo are several cabinets containing battery-banks sufficient to provide power to the entire room until the generator (see below) has time to start providing power.

In addition to the redundancy and reliability of the new power grid and the new power distributor, this machine room is also getting its very own generator, similar to the diesel-powered generator that currently provides backup power for the SSRB machine room. The concrete building which will house the new generator is currently being contructed between the CSE building and the Hub.

So what does a machine room need besides plenty of room for servers and three levels of power redundancy? Cool air. And that's covered, too. A new Liebert Precision Cooling Unit has been installed to provide redundancy (previously the room had only a single cooling unit), along with direct-exchange heat-rejection units, seen in the picture below. These provide additional redundancy, and are designed to cool the machine room in the event that the chilled water system goes down.