Hot Spots A Hot Topic

Data center "hot spots" are suddenly a hot topic for the technology media. Hewlett Packard's announcement yesterday of a new service to analyze the efficiency within data centers generated a blizzard of media coverage in the tech press, including articles in Business Week (via C/Net), InfoWorld, InternetNews.com, eWeek and Information Week.

The growing challenge of managing high-density equipment areas within the data center is hardly news to readers of CarrierHotels.com (see stories in April and November of last year). And yet the flurry of publicity greeting HP's announcement is a sign that awareness of cooling management has busted out beyond the data center walls and into the larger IT consciousness.

This is driven at least in part by educational efforts by user groups such as the 7x24 Exchange, whose local chapter in the Delaware Valley has devoted several recent meetings to the topic. Another driver is the growing interest and adoption of blade servers, which offer huge efficiencies in space utilization but equally huge heat management challenges.

Blade servers have been making headlines, with IBM, Hewlett Packard and Dell all rushing to position themselves alongside early adopters like RLX Technologies. It appears corporate end users are starting to see blade servers less as a novelty and more as the future of their data center.

Just about every new technology has a point at which it "crosses over" from hype to hip. Lots of highly-touted and energetically marketed products become "vaporware" when the market never shows up. It becomes a different story once the interest in a technology is being driven by users, rather than vendors.