Assessment, incentives key to government's data-center energy goals
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A roundtable about data-center efficiency held last week in Austin reinforced the need for metrics, assessments and other tools.
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Climate Savers Computing Initiative gathers vendors, groups, and EPA to push energy-efficient PCs.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM researchers are counting on a 40-year-old technology to keep modern, state-of-the-art datacenters running cool and allow companies to squeeze more computing power from the electricity they consume. These considerations are more important than ever. The power consumed by a rack of servers has risen from around 5 kilowatts (kW) of power per server rack five years ago to as much as 30 kW today, thanks to the introduction of more powerful processors and denser blade servers. And the power-consumption levels will continue rising in the years ahead. "People want more compute power and we can give it to them because we can package this into a smaller footprint, basically," said Roger Schmidt, chief thermal architect and distinguished engineer at IBM's Server and Workstation Division. The challenge that Schmidt and his colleagues face is how to dissipate the increasing levels of heat these systems generate. "We're working on this all the way from the chip to the datacenter," he said. At the datacenter level, Schmidt sees an expanded role for water cooling as a means to bring heat levels down. Water cooling, which uses small pipes filled with distilled or deionized water to dissipate heat, was first used by IBM to cool mainframe computers during the 1960s. The technology, which was used in more than 90 percent of mainframes by the mid-1980s, was given a second lease on life in 2005, when IBM introduced its line of Cool Blue water-cooling products. One such product is IBM's $4,299 Rear Door Heat eXchanger, which attaches to the rear of a server rack. Four inches thick and weighing about 32 kilograms (70 pounds) when filled with water, the Rear Door Heat eXchanger, can absorb more than half of the heat coming from a server rack, according to IBM. IBM's water-cooling systems, as well asÂ competing products from companies like Hewlett-Packard, offer several benefits for datacenters. Most importantly, water can absorb more heat than air, and the pumps required to circulate water in a cooling system consume less power than air-conditioning systems. And IBM plans to expand its line of water-cooling products in the months ahead. "We've got other enhancements coming out shortly," Schmidt said, declining to elaborate on specific details. One potential enhancement is to extend water cooling from the rear of the server rack to specific components, such as processors -- as was done with some IBM mainframes. "Once you bring water to the rack, you've got a lot of options," Schmidt said. Convincing datacenter operators to pipe water through racks filled with expensive servers and invaluable data is not always easy. The easiest to convince are those IT managers with experience from the days when water-cooled mainframes were the backbone of large corporations, Schmidt said. But many remain nervous at the thought of water-filled pipes coursing through rooms filled with expensive servers and invaluable data -- even though water is already a key component of all datacenters. "Water cooling in datacenters is already there," Schmidt said. "The chilled water that's brought to the air conditioning units? That's water and it's in the pipes right above the server racks. We're just plugging into that to apply that at the rack level."
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Google, Intel, Microsoft, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard pledged this week to develop and use more energy-efficient computers and computer components.
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The European Commission is considering introducing a voluntary code of conduct on energy efficiency for datacenter operators.
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The $100 millionÂ datacenter consolidation projectÂ being undertaken by Hewlett-Packard will help it be more efficient but also informs the consulting advice it gives to client companies.
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Google and Intel are leading a consortium of companies in an effort to reduce the amount of power wasted by personal computers.
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The Department of Energy has entered into a research and development agreement with TECSys to develop software aimed at monitoring and securing systems to help control the nation's electricity infrastructure.
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By JORDAN ROBERTSON SAN JOSE, Calif. - Intel Corp. has designed a computer chip that promises to perform calculations as quickly an entire data center - while consuming as much energy as a light bulb.
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An AMD study has revealed changes in global data center energy use.
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At a gathering this week, talk was about how to improve the energy use of data centers by taking a more holistic approach.
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By Mullins, Robert  HP Labs' research center has developed a new approach to cooling data centers that the company says can deliver 20% to 45% savings in cooling energy costs, depending on the size of the building.
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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--Oracle, Dell, Intel, and EMC are joining forces on a project aimed at combining their core technologies and technical resources to develop an enterprise grid computing
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Technology investors are on a crusade to influence energy policy because they have a big stake in the outcome.
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(Source: Liebert)  High-density servers are accelerating the demand for increased power and cooling capacity in the data center. Dell and Emerson Network Power have joined to devise four scenarios that address customer problems by utilizing Dell Energy Smart servers and Liebert cooling. These scenarios have shown such results as, up to a 250% performance gain with no increase in facility power requirements.
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TeamQuest predicts worthwhile data center trends for 2005
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There's little question that more and more storage and computing will move out into the cloud over time. The question--well, one of them anyway--is where the economic scale points lie.