HP Labs offers server cooling advances
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs research center has developed a new approach to cooling datacenters by adjusting air conditioning systems to changing server loads more precisely than what's available now. HP says its Dynamic Smart Cooling (DSC) technology, which the company claims can deliver 20 percent to 45 percent savings in cooling energy costs, depending on the size of the datacenter, will be available in mid-2007. DSC involves placing several heat sensors on racks of servers throughout the datacenter, which send information on changes in temperature to a central monitoring system. As the sensors detect an increase in a server's temperature, a signal is sent to the nearest of several air conditioning units to throttle up to cool that server. When the server cools down because it's not doing as much computing, the air conditioner throttles down. HP, which firstÂ introduced the concept of Dynamic Smart CoolingÂ in 2003, revealed a number of additional program details Tuesday. It announced creation of a Data Center Solution Builder program with design partners that will work with HP to implement a DSC solution, which can be retrofitted into an existing datacenter. HP has already started trials of the technology is going to implement DSC in new datacenters for its own operations at six U.S. locations. Also, Pacific Gas & Electric, the power utility serving Northern California, will make rebates available to datacenters that deploy DSC, said Mark Bramfitt, of PG&E. DSC is a way of addressing an energy consumption problem datacenters didn't have just five years ago, said Chandrakant Patel, an HP Fellow and one of the system designers. "Five years ago, no one got fired for wasting energy but they did get fired if the server went down," Patel said. But today, energy consumption is an issue and Dynamic Smart Cooling technology addresses datacenter management concerns about the operating expense of powering and cooling, said Paul Perez, vice president of HP's Technology Solutions Group. At a demonstration of the technology for media Tuesday at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, journalists could see that the datacenter in a nearby room was using 117 kilowatts of electricity to stay cool. But when the DSC system kicked in, consumption dropped to 72 kilowatts. Power consumption is, on average, 40 percent of the operating expense of running a datacenter, Perez said, citing industry research. And 60 percent to 70 percent of that energy expense goes to cooling the servers, he said. Other technology companies areÂ working on ways to keep datacenters cool, said Jonathan Eunice, founder and principal advisor at Illuminata, an IT research firm. Chip makers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are developingÂ processors that run coolerÂ than they have in the past, Eunice said. HP's chief competitor, IBM, is trying toÂ address thermal issuesÂ on a system level. "IBM does have its services arm with the ability to send out heating experts to map the datacenter hot spots and advise about efficiencies," said Eunice. IBM also offers a product called Power Executive that measures and modulates power consumption on a wide basis. Â ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Your data center gets the job done today, but how will it handle increasing demands of the future, especially fundamentals such as power and cooling?
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HP looks to utility, aggregation and legacies Following on from the formal launch earlier this month of the latest version of its Integrity Servers equipped with dual-core Montecito processors, HP put on a users' bash in London to drum up business from both existing and new customers.â¦
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Company shows off labor-saving data center technology at Palo Alto research lab.
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HP, at its Technology Forum in Las Vegas, said it is developing storage technology that more accurately assigns storage capacity as needed in an enterprise.
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Two manufacturers tout the benefits of high-performance computing as Congress looks to increase funding for HPC research in a move to keep the U.S. competitive in world markets.
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Syska Hennessy, an engineering, technology, and construction company, unveiled this week a unique design for cooling datacenters that would allow companies to pack almost double the number of servers into a datacenter space.
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By Shyla Sangaran  HAVING problems keeping your servers cool? Well, IBM Corp has introduced a new range of AMD Opteron processor-based servers that incorporate Cool Blue, a cooling technology that helps to improve server power utilisation and reduce energy costs.
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ATLANTA -- Low-end server technology is racing ahead of the ability of many data centers to keep the increasingly dense and fast systems cool, a problem that's stopping some IT managers from using the new machines.
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New products include slightly faster mainstream models and new lower-power server chips.
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Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has begun shipping a new product that the company thinks will give it an edge over rival IBM Corp. in the market for blade servers.
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InfoWorld - Hewlett-Packard launched a server based on&#160;Intel&#39;s new Tigerton quad-core Xeon processor&#160;Thursday, battling IBM for customers who run data-intensive business applications like enterprise resource planning and virtualization software.
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Gateway's new motherboard design helps machines run cooler and more quietly than other Gateway desktops.
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Engineers at Hewlett-Packard Co. are working on &quot;virus-throttling&quot; software that they say could slow the spread of Internet-borne viruses and worms.
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PC maker to launch new line of cooler, quieter business desktops.
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Hewlett-Packard Co., aiming to beef up its erratic enterprise computing business with new products, said Monday it is launching new high-end and mid-range server-computers and related software and services early this week.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard is enhancing security features on the HP-UX operating system for its Integrity line of servers amid growing customer concern about recent network security breaches. HP is announcing Monday the availability of a free upgrade to HP-UX 11i v2 that automatically encrypts data as it is stored. HP has offered this capability before, but this upgrade puts the encryption capability right into the operating system (OS). "If it's in the operating system, it's easily implemented without needing to do anything, and you're not going to break anything," said Charles Kolodgy, a research director at IDC focused on secure content and threat management products. IDC is about to release results of a survey of IT managers on their network security spending priorities for 2007, Kolodgy said. The survey will show that "file and folder encryption" has rocketed to the number one spot, from fifth in the 2006 survey, surpassing common concerns such as firewalls, network intrusion, viruses and spyware. What's changed in the last year is theÂ number of reports of serious security breaches, from theÂ U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs laptop stolenÂ in May and recovered in June, to the Dec. 12 report ofÂ hackers accessing personal information on 800,000Â current and prospective students at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sun Microsystems has added encryption capabilities to its Solaris OS that it originally offered only on its Trusted Solaris system for sensitive governmental use, Kolodgy said. And Microsoft is including an encryption feature called BitLocker in its new Vista OS. "They are all attempting to bring these solutions to the end user," he said, but he added that the HP upgrade is improved over prior HP offerings. HP is also offering an optional embedded chip on its Integrity servers that holds the digital keys to decrypt protected data. It claims this approach is more secure than software-based keys. Also, a new feature called HP Protected Systems allows a network security administrator to isolate certain data in unique compartments and configure different security settings for that data as needed. Adding encryption capabilities directly to storage hardware can require an expensive upgrade, which enterprises can avoid with an OS upgrade, said Ron Luman, the security architect for HP-UX. "What we have been asked to do [by customers] is provide something that is transparent to the applications and also transparent to the storage hardware, and so that means doing something to the operating system itself," Luman said.