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Emerson Uptime Champion Awards
Letting the data centre chill out
Sandeep Gupta, Head, Product Management and Corporate
Strategy, Emerson Network Power, on how CIOs can manage the growing power requirements
of their data centres.
Sandeep Gupta |
With application sizes scaling the sky and ever-increasing
processing speeds, managing heat dissipation can be quite a challenge. The laws
of heat dissipation and thermodynamics remain unchanged, but the difference
can be seen in the data centre sizes and in the number of instruction cycles
that server processors run in a given second.
Sandeep Gupta, Head, Product Management and Corporate Strategy, Emerson Network
Power, spoke about the trends affecting data centres and he also spoke of the
various methods adopted by his company to help CIOs with their cooling needs.
“Data centres built in 1990 had a life-cycle of about 15 to 16 years. Data
centres built in 2001-2002 have a life-cycle of about nine to 10 years.”
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Heat density is becoming so important
that in a power density situation of 250 watts per square foot, if the
cooling infrastructure fails, then within five minutes your servers will
touch about 500 degrees C
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Gupta spoke of the growing size of data centres. He was of
the opinion that data centres are becoming so huge that CIOs are finding it
difficult to accommodate sufficient racks within them. The biggest constraint
being faced is that of inadequate floor space. Power and cooling follow a close
second and third. Emerson conducted an internal survey which revealed that 96
percent of data centres will run out of capacity by 2011. Heat density is a
pressing problem in today’s data centres.
Speaking on the issue he said, “Heat density is becoming
so important that in a power density situation of 250 watts per square foot,
if the cooling infrastructure fails, then within five minutes your servers will
touch about 500 degrees C.” Thus, cooling becomes critical as density increases.
He spoke of the concept of hot and cold aisles. In this method, one lateral
half and the bottom of the rack are cooled by cold air. This concept seems attractive,
but it doesn’t scale with heavy loads.
The Liebert family, he said, helps CIOs with their data centre
cooling needs. This system supplements traditional methods of cooling. With
a load of about 16 Kw/rack with a load of 40 racks, traditional cooling allows
for only eight 30-ton precision air-conditioners, and the space required is
3,000 sq ft. However, in the new arrangement prescribed by Emerson with the
Liebert XD solution, Gupta said that CIOs could shrink the space needed by 50
percent. The new arrangement would need two 20-ton precision air-conditioners.
The amount of power required to cool 1 Kw of heat was 27 percent lower with
Liebert XD cooling.
Gupta also talked about blade adoption. “The survey that we conducted showed
us that 70 percent are in various stages of deploying blades. 46 percent have
blade servers on at least 20 percent of their racks.” IDC estimates that
blades will account for 25 percent of all server shipments by 2008.
- Infrastructure should allow you to reconfigure
with changing needs
- There should be no cost penalty for change
- Monitoring should enable uptime, not just assist
in correcting downtime
- Infrastructure should meet your availability
requirements without compromise
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| Heat Density |
22% |
| Space Constraints |
19% |
| Power Density |
18% |
| Adequate Monitoring Capabilities |
8% |
| Availability (Uptime) |
7% |
| Technology Changes |
7% |
| Energy Efficiency |
5% |
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