Denser Servers Lead to Increased Demand For Power and Cooling in Data Centers

Computerworld - LAS VEGAS -- Before starting construction of a new data center, Steven Olson, infrastructure manager at the Las Vegas Review Journal, visited about 40 existing ones to see how other IT managers approached cooling, power and design. “Most people are happy to let you in,” he said.

Olson’s employer, which operates a chain of newspapers, needed the new IT facility to meet the needs of its businesses, including an urgent requirement to upgrade and improve failing power systems. After his presentation at the Gartner data center conference here, Olson was peppered with questions by a group of attendees who sought details about his company’s data center, which was completed last spring.

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The bad news: By 2008, half of existing data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity for high-density IT equipment. The good news: By 2011, more efficient power and cooling management systems will be in wide use.

They weren’t idle questions.

Gartner estimates that by 2008, about half of the world’s data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to handle high-density servers. Indeed, many IT managers at the conference said they were planning or building new data centers, leasing additional space, or expanding or retrofitting an existing facility.

Mike Curtright, data center supervisor at Pemco Insurance Co. in Seattle, said his company recently signed a long-term lease for data center space in a facility built during the dot-com era. Originally a mainframe shop, Pemco has been moving to dense blade servers. But while many applications have been migrated from the mainframe to the blade systems, not all are being moved, because power and cooling demands are increasing. “We’re running out of chilling capacity,” Curtright said.

Data center managers must also decide which technologies to use to power and cool their systems. There’s an assortment of approaches to choose from, but some are still very new.

For instance, Barclays Capital, a division of Barclays Bank PLC in London, is using a carbon dioxide system to chill some of its servers. Paul Flatt, a consultant who is working on the project, said that although the CO₂ system is more expensive than a water-based one, it’s more resilient and efficient.

There are even cooling technologies that spray a nonconductive agent directly onto processors to prevent them from overheating.

But Gary Comens, IT manager at Raytown School District in Missouri, said he will approach these new cooling technologies cautiously. “I don’t know if we know what the long-term effects are of using these new substances on computer chips,” he said.

Another approach, computational fluid design, is being used by data center managers to eliminate hot spots by examining airflows and relocating servers to the best possible sites within IT facilities, said Jack Funchion, a project manager at Align Communications Inc., a data center design firm in New York.

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