Heat problems are severely restricting the capacity of
modern datacentres, and users need to address the problem urgently,
an analyst has warned.
IDC senior analyst Daniel Fleischer said, "Datacentres have been
built to cope with older technology." Modern blade servers can be
packed more densely into datacentre racks. They provide a
cost-effective way of increasing computational capacity in a
datacentre without requiring the extra expense of additional floor
space.
However, in Fleischer's experience, a rack can accommodate only
40% of the blades it could potentially hold because of power and
cooling constraints. This means that only abot 19 blades can be
fitted in a rack, instead of the full quota of 48.
A fully configured rack containing 48 blades could produce about
20kW of heat, which must be removed from the datacentre.
Case study: Inpharmatica cools down with the help of
Infrastruxure
Manufacturer American Power Conversion (APC) has extended its
Infrastruxure cooling units for racks to address the problem of
overheating in blade server datacentres.
The cooling system works by directing hot air expelled from the
back end of a server into an air-conditioning unit, which passes
the cooled air back to the front of the server.
Cooling units fitted to either side of the rack provide further
cooling. APC says Infrastruxure can cool up to 60kW per rack.
APC uses software to produce simulations of airflow within the
datacentre. This allows different designs to be evaluated prior to
installing the equipment.
One organisation that benefits from this approach to cooling is
bioinformatics company Inpharmatica. The firm runs blade racks in a
co-location centre from Globix. It was looking to bring six fully
populated blade server racks into the Globix datacentre.
Steve Tringham, IT director at Inpharmatica said, "We are using
about 400 processors in a Linux cluster. The big issue is that
cooling becomes a significant factor."
The challenge, said Globix, was that the blade racks needed by
Inpharmatica required 15kW of power and cooling. Globix used APC's
Infrastruxure architecture to support the cooling requirements of
Inpharmatica's racks.
Dave Brooks, European IDC and facilities manager at Globix,
said, "APC's air-conditioning units are in-row to bring the cooling
much closer to the load, and by sealing the hot aisle through
adding a ceiling and doors, the high-density racks are completely
temperature neutral in the datacentre."