The Heat Is On (continued)
Power, Power Everywhere
And it's not just the processors that are getting more powerful -- the same thing is happening to storage devices and Ethernet switches, which take more power to handle more bandwidth, Golding adds. There is more capacity in data centers "to the tune of fifty-times the processing power, and a hundred-times the storage and networking capacity in a single cabinet. And that means you're using much more power and that's generating much more heat," Golding says. At the same time, because generators and air conditioning units are only so big, data centers are running out of power.
According to research firm International Data Corp., 40 percent of data center end users report that power demand is greater than the supply. What's the answer? Ideally, says Golding, outsourcing or building a better data center designed with more power and greater cooling capacity per square foot. "Designers and electrical and mechanical engineers are designing for large enterprises two to three times the cooling and power capacity than what presently exists,'' he says.
"The goal is to guarantee the inlet temperature to the IT equipment so the fans are always pulling in the same temperature as the air,'' says Kevin Dunlap, director of business strategies, Cooling Group, at American Power Consumption Corp (APCC) in St. Louis, Mo. "The easiest way for us to guarantee that temperature is to remove heat from the back of the server and not give it a chance to mix with the air in the rest of room."
It's more efficient to cool at the row level, he says, because when air is blown from a source that's much further away, the air has to be cooled down to a much lower temperature, which takes more energy.
Dunlap says for energy saving reasons, the new servers "pull back" when they're not being asked to do lot of computing. But the cooling system has to be able to respond quickly and the power has to be there to support the equipment when it springs to life again.
"As computing loads moves around the data center, the power and cooling has to move around data center to mirror that compute load,'' he adds. "That's the next challenge we're facing." (article continues)
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