Vendors feel heat to cool hardware

As data center equipment gets smaller and more robust, figuring out how to power and cool it adequately is becoming an increasingly major challenge.

This month, a flurry of activity focusing on IT heat and power demands - including new products from Egenera and HP, and conferences sponsored by data center association AFCOM and the Environmental Protection Agency - highlight the need for IT managers to stay on top of industry trends as they plan their next-generation data centers.

"The issues of heat and power are critical," says Eric French, network systems manager at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, which has seen its energy operating expenses increase by more than $1.5 million per year during the past two years. "We don't want to run into a crunch situation . . . and with the price of energy, we want to use as little as possible."

Although the basic assumption for data center design used to be that a typical rack of servers would draw 2 kilowatts of power and give off an equivalent amount of heat, analysts say that demand is now around 8 or 10 kilowatts. Fully loaded racks could push the power envelope to more than 20 kilowatts - hotter than two household ovens - especially with extremely dense blade servers.

And it's not just servers. American Power Conversion, which sells power and cooling devices for data centers, notes that today's communications equipment, along with new servers, generate about 10 times the heat per square foot as their predecessors did 10 years ago. The Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, for example, creates a heat load of 15 to nearly 17 kilowatts of heat per rack.

Technologies such as lower-power chips, multi-core processors and on-chip power management are emerging to stem fast-rising power demands, but IT managers still must look at alternative ways to cool harder-working systems than simply adding HVAC, experts say.

"The last thing I would want to do if I were a data center manager is buy more HVAC. That's a huge investment," says John Humphreys, a research manager at IDC. "So what are the incremental investments you can make that help you avoid doing things like re-architecting, reconfiguring or buying more data center space, or more cooling or power? Those are the issues vendors are trying to address through services [and] investments in R&D."

Virtualization is one approach. With it IT managers can reduce the number of physical systems they need to power and cool by consolidating multiple workloads into virtual machines on single physical systems.

Other approaches include taking a closer look at applications and decommissioning those that are no longer necessary, and distributing systems to eliminate hot spots. At the same time, IT managers should keep an eye on new products and services as they put a heightened focus on power and cooling.

The University of Florida last fall brought in Opteron-based servers from Rackable Systems, which focuses on thermal design to avoid spending more than $350,000 to build a new machine room to triple the size of its high-performance computing cluster.