Power & Cooling

One of the topic areas we'd like to talk about is the impact of power and cooling trends on hyperscale operations.  As the size of scale-out platforms grows ever larger, server designs continue to drive for increased density. In this first post to our power and cooling section, Drew Schulke of the DCS Services team takes a look at some of the factors impacting organizations that house high-density systems in a co-location facility.  If you house a large compute pool based on blades or other high-density solutions in a colo facility please take a look at Drew's post and tell us what you're seeing.

I've been on the road in China most of this week and had a great opportunity to meet with journalists and analysts during an event in Beijing. My discussion with them focused on how we help customers address power and cooling challenges that they face in their data centers. This is a growing global issue - one that IDC refers to as the number one challenge faced by data center managers today.

 Dell takes a comprehensive approach to power and cooling in the data center, taking into account the synergy between equipment, power utilization rates, cooling and software solutions. By doing so, we help customers to "reveal their hidden data centers" - essentially enabling them to identify and take advantage of previously unutilized compute capacity within the same power envelope. Analysis we've done shows that we can help customers increase data center performance by 97 percent using the same space. This holistic approach to energy efficiency enables customers to extend the life of their existing data centers and helps them avoid or postpone costly rip-and-replace infrastructure upgrades or building new facilities.

 You can hear more details from my recent discussion on this topic during The Register's Green Computing Debate. I'm also interested in hearing and answering your questions related to Green IT and power & cooling. Please send your questions my way so we can help you properly address energy efficiency and take the next step toward revealing your hidden data center.  

It's highly likely that a major disruption to corporate computing operations is going to come from increasing energy requirements and the actions we need to take in order to minimize their impact on the services we provide.  It's not just that energy costs are rapidly rising, but the use of that expensive energy is rising along with it.

Large scale data center operators are already heavily engaged in these discussions as evidenced by an interview Searchdatacenter did with Jeff Lowenberg of  The Planet, a hosting company in Houston, TX.  Jeff talks about a number of interesting things, including how they caulk leaks in the floor to keep from losing cold air and how they maintain their diesel generators. The last part on maintaining diesel fuel probably has excellent tips that anybody depending on large generators for backup electricity needs to know.

There's going to be new concepts, vocabulary  and acronyms to learn, such as air mixing,  hot aisle, cold aisle, chiller, CRAC (computer-room air-conditioning system), close-coupled cooling,  PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness)  and  DCE (Data Center Efficiency).

The good news is that fairly simple things can be done to improve the situation, without having to take more extreme measures as relocating to Iceland.  Dell's Dr. Albert Esser, who wrote today on Inside IT, was also featured in a recent article on the Computing site, talking about how temperatures in data centers can be kept warmer than people commonly think.   This article in CIO magazine also has some fairly simple ideas for more efficient cooling.

One of the biggest hurdles we face is getting senior management engaged.  This recent survey by the Uptime Institute (you've read about them if you read the other links in this post) contains fascinating information about the awareness of power and cooling as an issue. Many readers will likely identify with their findings that two thirds of those polled said their companies do not C-level sponsorship for green policy or governance mandates.  FWIW, The Uptime Institute puts on seminars for high density cooling, as well as other energy topics.  This podcast of an interview with Robert Sullivan is an introduction to those seminars.  Not having been to one of their seminars, I don't want this post to be perceived as an endorsement of their seminars - but if readers have comments to make about them, I'm more happy to post them.

I have a feeling this is going to be a huge deal and there will be lots of confusion and many opportunities for people to help each other out.  What are you seeing?  Is this stuff on your radar yet?  Is it front and center in your company or are you going it alone?  

This was originally posted here, on the EqualLogic Storage@Work blog 

This was originally posted here, on the EqualLogic Storage@Work blog.