Powering Up And Cooling Down The Data Center

Power blackouts and brownouts, the rising cost of electricity and the increased density of high-powered, heat-producing equipment have companies scrambling for ways to reduce energy use and solve cooling issues in the data center.

Solution providers are coming to the rescue, but with a focus on point solutions rather than complete data center rebuilds. The solutions are likely to include new low-powered servers and storage devices, many of which include virtualization technology to help cut the number of physical devices. These devices will be connected to energy-efficient power supplies and rack-centered cooling technologies.

For data centers, problems with power and cooling are either huge and immediate or are looming, said Mark Bramfitt, targeted market supervisor in charge of high-tech areas at Pacific Gas and Electric, based in San Francisco.

Whether it's IT companies on the West Coast or financial companies on the East Coast, data center power usage is growing 20 percent to 50 percent a year, Bramfitt said. "They have incredible growth rates and are finding it more and more difficult to accommodate it both with existing and new data centers," he said.

Enterprise customers, as well as midsize businesses with 10 to 15 servers, realize they have a problem, said Joe Kadlec, vice president and senior partner at Consiliant Technologies, a solution provider in Irvine, Calif. "They keep putting Band-Aids on," he said.

Pointing out legacy data center issues can be a good starting point in the sales conversation, Kadlec said. For instance, these customers may have racks with Plexiglas doors that look pretty but interfere with air circulation. Or they may have problems with new, high-density computing products.

"A couple weeks ago, we were in a data center where the customer was blowing hot air into racks across the walkway between the racks," Kadlec said. "A lot of people are installing blade servers, and they're hot. A lot of time there's not enough cooling, and a lot of time not enough power. This company had home fans trying to cool them."

Poor planning is often at fault, Kadlec said. "Some customers use portable air conditioners, like those used at football games," he said. "It's expensive, and you get condensation."

There are two extremes of cooling issues for the data center, said Frank Gillett, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. The first is what Gillett calls the classic situation in which someone at the data center brags that his gear runs cooler than someone else's. The second is the need to build or rebuild an entire data center.

Solution providers, he said, can work in between those two. "They need to look at the power consumption and the heat load of specific gear. They need to say to their customer, 'I found what you need, and here's how it can cut your power and cooling costs.' "

For now, solution providers are seeing success by implementing several new servers and in many cases adding virtualization on top of them. Virtualizing servers is one of the best ways to cut power requirements, Pacific Gas and Electric's Bramfitt said.