HP announced three products Monday designed to help enterprise users deal with power management difficulties. The products, due to ship Feb. 6, include a water-cooled heat exchanger unit which can be attached to the side of a server rack.

Heat issues are being exacerbated as users bring more denser servers, including blades, and multicore processors into their data centers, according to Paul Perez, vice president, storage, networking and infrastructure for industry standard servers at HP.

"Moore's Law is running into the law of physics," Perez said in a phone interview Friday. Moore's Law, coined by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months.

While chips and their power consumption needs are evolving rapidly, data centers haven't changed all that much, Perez said. He estimates that the ratio between the cost of power and cooling that power is fast approaching a one-to-one relationship compared with the situation a few years ago when it typically cost $0.30 to cool every $1 of power. At the same time, hardware vendors are finding themselves talking not only to a customer's IT personnel about equipping a data center but also addressing the concerns of a company's facilities department keen to know how much they need to budget for power for the next three years.

To help cool down data centers, HP and IBM have both turned to an older technology used by mainframes, water cooling, by tapping into existing chilled water supplies within a company's data center or into the entire building's air conditioning system. IBM announced its eServer Rear Door Heat eXchanger, previously codenamed "Cool Blue" back in July 2005. The four-inch thick water-cooled door fits onto IBM's eServer Enterprise rack.

Instead of a door, HP's Modular Cooling System (MCS) is a heat exchanger that attaches to the side of an HP server rack. Perez said the device can cool up to 30 kilowatts of power in a single rack. The exchanger costs $30,500 and can be managed via HP's Systems Insight Manager (SIM) which receive alarms from the device in the event of an accidental water leak.

"This [water cooling] is an emerging sweet spot," Perez said. HP started thinking about using water cooling in data center racks back in 1998, he added, with the company developing MCS over the past eighteen months to two years. MCS does require plumbing work and HP is offering installation services to support the product, according to Perez.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.