The server-packed render farms at
Pixar Animation Studios [1] have created classic animated films including Toy Story, Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up!. But all that rendering can generate some heat. At the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit, Pixar IT engineer Jay Weiland provided an overview of a project in which Pixar used a cold aisle containment system from
Polargy [2] to address rising heat loads in one of its render farms. The room contained gear using 335 kilowatts of power in a 1,600 square foot space, resulting in density of more than 200 watts per square foot. The containment system solved the room’s hot spot issues, with a payback of less than four months (including a rebate from utility PG&E). “The return was so quick it was ridiculous,” said Weiland. “For us, that was the lowest hanging fruit.” This video runs about 3 minutes, 30 seconds.
For more on this topic, see our
Data Center Cooling Channel [3]. For additional video, check out our
DCK video archive [4] and the
Data Center Videos [5] channel on YouTube.
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/2010/02/10/pixar-animation-chills-out-its-server-room/
URLs in this post:
[1] Pixar Animation Studios: http://www.pixar.com/
[2] Polargy: http://www.polargy.com/
[3] Data Center Cooling Channel: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/category/cooling/
[4] DCK video archive: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/data_center_videos-index.html
[5] Data Center Videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/DataCenterVideos
[6] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/
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