Data Center Knowledge

Phil Windley on Data Center Design

Posted By Rich Miller On September 9, 2005 @ 5:52 pm In Data Center Design | Comments Disabled

Popular IT blogger Phil Windley [1], the former CIO for the state of Utah, recently had a briefing with IBM on data center issues. This included the chalenge of cooling high-density server space [2] in data centers, on which Phil made these observations:
Power and cooling are a shell game. You solve it at the CPU level by moving it to the chassis. You solve it in the chassis by moving it to the rack. You solve it in the rack by moving it to the data center. Many data centers start off with good air handling set-ups, but, like anything else, unless they’re maintained and re-evaluated from time-to-time, over time the performance degrades and the data center just can’t take the load. As a result, the shell game comes full circle and some of the heat that started out in the server is pulled right back in with the cooling air instead of being taken out of the data center and dumped.

As Phil notes, a holistic view of the problem is required to avoid a partial fix. Another take on a familiar and important issues for data center designers and operators.

About Rich Miller [3]

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

Article printed from Data Center Knowledge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com

URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2005/09/09/phil-windley-on-data-center-design/

URLs in this post:

[1] Phil Windley: http://phil.windley.org/

[2] cooling high-density server space: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1824

[3] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/

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