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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?"
"Roger Schmidt, chief thermodynamics engineer at IBM, [recently] admitted that, while everyone knows servers are one day going to be water-cooled, no one wants to be first, believing that if their competitors still claim they are fine with air cooling, the guy who goes to water cooling will rapidly drop back in sales until others admit it is necessary."
you know, some times the market actually rewards innovation. tough to believe, i know, and this isn't innovation, it's common sense, but mfg's are afraid of this? come on, people, the technocenti have been doing this for their home servers for a long, long time, let's bring it into the corporate world.
nothing worth possessing isn't possessed. or something.
I'm not an EE, but it's something I've always wondered about. I don't have a datacentre, but I do have far too many computers: why does my machine room contain about fifteen wall warts, all producing slightly different DC voltages and plugged in to their various appliances via fifteen different non-standard connectors? Why not just have one low-voltage standard and have all these things plug into that?
One possible reason is that (IIRC) power losses vary according to current, not voltage. By increasing the voltage, you can push the same amount of energy down a wire using a smaller current, which limits losses. This is why power lines use very high voltages.
This means that if you produce regulated 5V at one side of your datacentre, by the time it's reached the other side it's not 5V any more. But it should be easy to get round this by producing 6V and having DC regulators; they're very small and extremely efficient these days.
However, I suspect that the main reason why this kind of thing isn't done is inertia. There's so much infrastructure in place for dealing with high-voltage AC supplies that you wouldn't get off the ground using DC.
Well, since my last company had most of their servers in a data center room where we had two different floods, I'd say I have a pretty good idea which hosting company will be the first to bring water into the data center ...
The first problem was snow that piled up outside, combined with clogged drains, that led to melting snow coming in through the wall where some pipes entered/exited. Since their layout was power in the floor and networking in the ladder racks, it's actually pretty amazing that a large portion of the power plugs and switches still worked, even while being submerged in 6 inches of water.
So about a year after they had taken care of that issue, a water pipe for a bathroom on the floor above burst, and of course the water came down right in our room in the hosting center. It wasn't so bad until the flourescent lights in the ceiling filled up and started to over flow. We were able to limit the damage by throwing tarps over the tops of all the racks (there goes your cooling effect, though), but we still lost about 100K worth of server and switching equipment.
So yeah, water in the data center? It's been done.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
We use -48VDC, and it's a pain in the ass to find power supplies for modern hardware.
Whenever we need something outside of normal ATX, we wind up paying custom development fees.
No one makes DC to DC power supplies that are worth a damn, and the few vendors who do sell them (Sun, IBM, etc) charge an arm and a leg above and beyond what we pay to have them custom engineered.
Bob was changing backup tapes when something caught his eye at his feet. Looking through te holes in the cooling tile in the raised floor, something was moving, like a bundle of shiny snakes. Looking closer, we had 1/2" of water down there!
We spent several hours with a tiny shop vac (we need a bigger one!) emptying the water and being thankful Bob had seen it before it got high enough to get into the power conduits.
An A/C unit drain pan had a clogged drain, so the sump pump couldn't carry the water away. Whoever had the units installed had purchased water alarms, but *they had never been hooked up*. Now *that* was a brilliant move.
We now have water alarms down there.
Meanwhile, the room stays about 70 degrees, and the servers stay comfy, as do we. I like it that way,
Converting to DC can help a lot in big datacenters if you have a lot of hardware. UPS's run exclusively off DC. (remember, they're basically just chains of car batteries daisy-chained together) The datacenters lose power & generate heat in the conversion from AC to DC and back to AC. They're always happy to avoid that second step if possible. And if you happen to have hardware located in a datacenter where telcos have equipment you're likely to find a huge DC infrastructure already in place since a lot of telco equipment runs on DC.
Personally I think BOTH the power & the cooling needs to be addressed. I've worked in datacenters where cabinets are filled with 30+ 1U servers. Not only is it a royal pain in the ass to deal with all the power cabling for 30 individual servers but the heat blowing out the back of those cabinets is enough to melt the polar ice caps...
I've also worked on blade servers like IBM's BladeCenter. Their next generation of blades will require even more power than it currently does. Trying to convince a datacenter to run 4 208 volt feeds to handle just a pair of BladeCenters (28 blades) is like pulling teeth. They can't comprehend that much power in such a small footprint. A rack full of BladeCenters could easily require 8 208 volt feeds, whereas a rack full of 1U's may only need 3 or 4 110 volt feeds.