Many factors contribute to the pressing shortage of power and cooling that most data centers are facing. Fundamentally, however, the core issue is that today’s businesses and consumers have a ravenous and constantly growing appetite for digital information. Traditionally, businesses have responded to such pressures by constructing new data centers or expanding existing ones. Yet either approach costs millions of dollars and can take two or more years to complete.
Many companies are therefore utilizing virtualization and blade servers to pack more computing power into existing facilities. Virtualization enables a single physical server to support multiple “virtual machines,” each running its own operating system and applications. This allows IT departments to consolidate underutilized servers onto bigger, more powerful host devices, conserving data center floor space while lowering hardware procurement and maintenance costs. However, precisely because they dramatically increase compute densities, both virtualization and blade servers also place greater demands on electrical circuits and cooling systems than conventional servers do, raising per-rack loads from 5 kW on average to 10, 15, 25 kW or more.
Thus, the two most effective strategies for coping with the world’s insatiable hunger for information continually leave data centers searching for more power and more cooling. This white paper from Eaton examines the underlying roots of today’s data center power and cooling crisis and outlines five steps businesses can take to support intensifying IT requirements economically by removing inefficiencies from their power and cooling infrastructure. Click here to down load this white paper on power and cooling strategies.
