Inside SGI’s Air-Cooled Modular Data Center

Data Center Knowledge recently got a detailed video tour of the retooled SGI ICE Cube modular data center, which features fresh air cooling.

SGI was one of the early players in the container data center sector with its water-cooled ICE Cube portable unit. Last week the company unveiled a retooled ICE Cube modular data center that can be cooled entirely by air. The fresh air cooling allows the unit to run outdoors in cool climates, improving energy efficiency by foregoing mechanical refrigeration. At the Gartner Data Center Conference, SGI’s Patrick Yantz gave DCK a detailed tour of the new unit. Patrick provides an overview of the new orientation of the ICE Cube module, which allows easy expansion, and demonstrates how SGI’s software management package can remotely throttle fans up and down. This video runs about 13 minutes.

For a comparison, see our 2008 video tour of the original ICE Cube Container built by Rackable, SGI’s predecessor company.

For more news on modular data centers, visit our Data Center Containers Channel. For additional video, check out our i/o Data Centers Channel and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

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About Rich Miller

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.