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Blade
Servers Driving New Approaches
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Stephen Spinazzola, vice president of RTKL
Technologies of Baltimore, agrees that something has to change,
and soon.
"The
old paradigm doesn't work any more," said Spinazzola. "We
feel the existing technology is compromising reliability. If you're
deploying blade server technology, you're feeling the pain."
The problem,
Spinazzola insists, is that too often the chilled air is cooling
the air between the cabinets. "Our approach is to cool the
cabinet, not the room," he said.
RTKL's
"Tower of Cool"
approach takes the chilled air beneath the raised floor and sends
it directly into the base of the cabinet, through the equipment
and then out into the ceiling. With this technique the air enters
the enclosure at a temperature of 55 degrees, as opposed to 62 to
67 degrees for "room first" cooling, according to Spinazzola.
Other panelists
are pursing different approaches.
"Air
alone is not the answer," says Strickland of Sanmina. "We
have to find a way to take the heat out of the cabinet."
Sanmina,
which manufactures enclosures and cooling products, is using a chilled
water cooling system in its new line of Ecobay
cabinets. "The amount of heat that can be removed by water
is roughly 3,500 times that which can be removed by the same volume
of air," the company says in a white paper supporting the Ecobay
product.
Sanmina's
Ecobay enclosures feature a cooling module in the base of the cabinet.
Chilled air is blown up through the front of the enclosure, and
then flows horizontally through the server equipment before being
recirculated through the heat exchanger and sent back into the cabinet.
"The cabinet becomes the data center, in a sense,"
says Strickland. "It gives you maximum density, and the energy
gain is the cost savings." Strickland said Sanmina is also
working to include fire suppression capabilities into the Ecobay
product, which could contain fire retardant releases within an enclosure.
What about
the resistance of some facility managers to introducing water into
the data center?
"We
feel the customer doesn't have much choice," said Strickland.
"If you plumb it right, it won't leak. We're taking water back
to the data center floor."
Like Strickland,
Baer is a little surprised at industry resistance to water-cooled
systems. Liebert's RackCooler
system, which uses chilled water, attaches to the rear of existing
existing cabinets.
"It
seems like the whole industry forgot that IBM had a water-cooled
mainframe for a decade," said Baer.
Whether
driven by amnesia or apprehension, that wariness is real and poses
a genuine challenge in marekting water-cooled enclosures, said Baer.
"The pushback was pretty significant," he said.
As a result,
Liebert is focusing on refrigerants as the cooling medium in a new
line of products. "If it leaks, it vaporizes," said Baer.
Vendors
and consultants say more innovation lies ahead, as makers of cooling
products seek to keep pace with the evolution of ever-shrinking
web server.
"This problem is not going away," said Mangan. "Vendors
will tell you that the new processors are more efficient. But if
you put enough of them in a cabinet, you're still left with that
the the cabinet still has that heavy load."
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