Cooler Servers or Cooler Rooms?

mstansberry writes "Analysts, experts and engineers rumble over which is more important in curbing server heat issues; cooler rooms or cooler servers. And who will be the first vendor to bring water back into the data center?"

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Water-chilled Cabinets Already In Use for Blades

[miller60]

Liebert and Sanmina have been selling blade server cabinets that use chilled water for at least three years. Vendors and data center operators have been wrestling with the heat loads generated by blade servers since 2001, and the dilemma of how to cool high-density "hot spots" has caused many tech companies to wait on buying blades to replace their larger servers. That's changing now, driven by the need to save costs with more efficient use of data center space.

The industry has taken a two-pronged approach. Equipment vendors have been developing cabinets with built-in cooling, while design consultants try to reconfigure raised-floor data center space to circulate air more efficiently. The problem usually isn't cooling the air, but directing the cooled air through the cabinet properly.

There was an excellent discussion of this problem last year at Data Center World in Las Vegas. As enterprises finally start to consolidate servers and adopt blade serves (which were overhyped for years), many are finding their data centers simply aren't designed to handle the "hot spots" created by cabinets chock full of blades. Facilities with lower ceilings are particularly difficult to reconfigure. The additional cooling demand usually means higher raised floors, which leaves less space to properly recirculate the air above the cabinets. Some data center engineers refer to this as "irreversibility" - data center design problems that can't be corrected in the physical space available. This was less of an issue a few years back, when there was tons of decent quality data center space available for a song from bankrupt telcos and colo companies. But companies who built their own data centers just before blades became the rage are finding this a problem.