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Google Patent Reveals New Data Center Innovations
miller60 writes "'Google is seeking to patent a system that provides precision cooling inside racks of servers, automatically adjusting to temperature changes while reducing the energy required to run chillers.' The cooling design uses an adjustable piping system featuring 'air wands' that provide small amounts of cold air to components within a server tray. The cooling design, which could help Google reduce the power bill for its servers, reinforces Google's focus on data center innovation as a competitive advantage. Check out the patent application and a diagram of the system."
This is why patents are stupid. An innovative new way to save the planet, and, guess what, YOU CAN'T HAVE IT.
Hmmm... Is creating patents for things like this "evil"? Seeking to prevent others from saving energy (unless they pay a toll) is not good for this planet, and I'm not sure if passes for "good".
Place nail here >+
There have been 17000 youtube searches for Natalie Portman naked in the last 450 milliseconds. We need a burst of cold air on rack 1000001, processor 304 on the second chip on the third stick of RAM.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
only 7 comments in and http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/ has been slashdotted :(
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
They can cross that off the list and carry on with other solutions to the
Error establishing a database connection
problem...
man, I feel like mold.
Going off the summary...
I invented that! Money please!
For real though, if people listened to me once in a while they would be rich. How do I cut out the middle man.....
This is EXACTLY what patents were developed for. A mechanical system like this has a FAIRLY LIMITED LIFETIME (unlike copyrights).
As it is, I think that the approach that they are taking is actually the wrong way. OTH, It is better than what is currently done. Others like MS could license it. More likely MS will introduce a similar patent and it will go through due to how stupid the US patent office has become.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Engineer: Hmmm, looks like system 8323 is hot, maybe we should cool it down somehow.
Patent Attorney: Great idea! How many different ways can we cool it? When can I have a New Invention Report?
I can only hope that this straw contributes to breaking the camel's back.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Don't tell me "Datacenter Knowledge" got slashdotted.....not good for teh community.
Seriously - is it too hard to note that it's only a Patent Application at this point?
Just pretend they never had the idea at all and nothing has changed.
Bullshit. That is assuming that no-one else would have had this idea if Google didn't. Considering that practically every major invention has been developed independently by several people, that is a ridiculous position to take.
Patents can absolutely create a situation that is worse off than if the "inventor" had never thought of the idea. Whether Google is "Evil" or not depends on how they choose to use the patent.
Sorry, but they still need to remove the exact same amount of waste heat, while the cost of blowing air around is minimal, so I fail to see how this will save much if anything. It may even use slightly more energy since the smaller pipes will have more turbulence and may require more blower power.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
First, having a patent means basically nothing. It doesn't mean it works, that it's practical, or that it will be used by anyone.
Second, this type of patent is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to enforce. Prior art aside, how many data centers do you know that are open to public inspection? They can't just go buy a widget to compare them.
Seems like little more than a trophy (framed patent) for someone's office wall.
"Negative pressure" is unscientific. How can nothing accomplish something?
You are obviously a product of the USian education system.
I think the patent system is screwed up, but not based on anything in your description. Namely, the patent process strongly favors those with deep pockets, programmers waste a lot of time just trying to figure out what is and is not patented, a small company (and even some large ones) can be sued out of existence just for infringing a patent they never knew existed, and the twenty year duration is a veritable eternity in the software industry. (Granted, this discussion is about a hardware device, but a lot of the animosity against patents in general comes from frustration with software patents.*)
We are, however, very fortunate that patent duration has not followed the same trend as copyright, else we would still be paying licensing fees for inventions from the nineteenth century.
* I once took a poll of users on a site with a fair number of highly technical users, asking if anyone had written a useful (in their estimation) program that they did not release because of patent concerns. I was surprised by how many said yes. (The results were 7 yes versus 11 no: not a large enough sample size to extrapolate a trend, but interesting.)
Military avionics has had very directed cooling for years. Cool air is a scarce resource in field systems. Here's an engineered cooling system for VME boards. Military PC boards tend to have covers over the components. ("When someone is fixing your system, it's too hot, too cold, too dusty, or too wet, and someone may be shooting at them." - a reminder given military hardware designers.) Those covers can be designed to direct airflow. The covers then plug into an air plenum which feeds air into the covers.
The military designs go much further than civilian ones do. They'll use heavier copper on boards to improve conduction, and mounting rails designed to dissipate heat from the board into the chassis frame. The whole thing is designed so that somebody just slams the module into the rack and turns the locking handle without worrying about this.
More interesting to me are the power supply designs. Explicitly exposing the 12v and 5v busses, so a single external one can power an entire rack. Saves a lot of energy by eliminating inverter/rectifier pairs at the data center UPS and power supply. If ordinary commercial power supplies and office/home UPSs had this, we would all benefit tremendously.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.