Heat and Power Issues in Data Centers
One of the biggest power-consumption issues in data centers is cooling all those servers. There are a couple of ways to address this cooling issue. Consolidating the servers you have, can reduce the number of boxes running at all, and this will immediately address the cost of powering the data center as well as addressing the cost to lower the temperature in the center. Along with consolidation comes questions of how well the servers will run when they are running either virtual machines (a common way to consolidate while maintaining much of the security of having physical separation between resources) or policy-separated access to sensitive files using group-access policies.
I am a certified APC InfrastruXure Specialist, so I would offer that efficient cooling, like that available with the InfrastruXure model, is an excellent addition to your power-reduction plans for your updated data center. When I go into an average data center and see all the fronts of all the server racks, all facing me as I walk in the door, I know that the company is using too much power to cool their racks, sometimes 40 to 60% too much, and they may very well be voiding the warrantees of all the servers from the second row back because the heat is being blown out of the backs of on rack directly into the faces of the racks behind. Server manufacturers often require that the cool-air side of their servers bring in air at less than 80 degrees farenheit. The air exhausted by a rack of servers can be higher than 165 degrees faranheit, and this air coming into the cool-air side of a server can cause the server to fail.
When the temperatures are out of control, many companies try turning up the comfort-level AC to bring the front-sides of the servers down into warrantee-safe temperature range. This causes widely differing temperatures all over the server room, but does not always fix the over-heating of the racks. It causes instead a bunch of roving hot and cold spots all over the room, as the air currents churn. Since hot air rises and expands upward and cool air falls, the air being provided by comfort-AC units set high on walls and ceilings tends blow out about 12 feet and drop. The racks near the AC vents are not getting any of the cooling, and the cool air is mixing with the hottest air in the room before it drops to the racks and even gets a chance to start cooling the ares between the racks.
The InfrastruXure rack system puts the cooling where it is needed and routes the hot air away from the room, so your comfort AC works economically and your server temperature stays reasonable.
Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkListTags: APC, Data center costs