6 things you can do now to fight power and cooling problems

Computerworld - "Escalating power and cooling demands in the data center are the biggest problems that I have consistently seen at client sites in the last year, with  network routers and switches as the second largest contributors," says Jerry Murphy, senior VP and director of research operations with Robert Frances Group and former analyst with META Group. "I call it the dark underbelly of Moore's Law. Some clients are to the point that the power companies cannot supply enough electricity to them, and they have to have their own generating plants."

Dean Davison, vice president of strategic sourcing at Nautilus Advisors and former META Group outsourcing guru, says that power/cooling density problems have become a common reason for corporations outsourcing their data centers in recent years, as their present sites are simply made outmoded by the exploding power and air cooling demands of the latest processors.

The basic problem, says Murphy, is that as chips double in processing power every 12 to 18 months, they also double in power demand. And the more power they consume, the more heat they generate. "This wasn't a problem when a processing chip drew 2 watts of power and a year later the new one drew 4 watts," Murphy says. "But when you go from 128 watts to 256, it becomes more of a problem."

And the problem is not just the processors themselves. The transformers that change the AC power from the wall to the DC that computers need also generate a lot of heat, particularly when computer makers trying to cut costs use inefficient, cheap transformers. Often, these are mounted directly on the system boards, concentrating the heat generation further. This also increases operating costs for the data center. If the data center spends $1 million a year on power but the transformers are only 70% efficient on average, then the company is wasting $300,000 a year.

New designs -- particularly blade servers, which can increase the concentration of processing power, and therefore power demand, eight times per square foot -- compound the problem by packing multiple processors and transformers in a much smaller space. And more power means an equal increase in cooling demand. Data center executives see cooling costs reaching 50% to 100% of the cost of the power that the systems they cool consume.

The manufacturers are now beginning to respond to the problem. Processor manufacturers are developing lower-power chips -- AMD and Intel have announced that their next generation processors will draw less power, Sun has announced Cool Thread and IBM is working with PA Semiconductor to develop a new generation of Power PC chips that cut power consumption 75% over the present generation. Builders are moving to more efficient transformers, and the latest designs in blade systems take the individual transformers off the boards and instead use a single efficient transformer for the entire rack.