On 3/29/08, Alex Pilosov <alex@pilosoft.com> wrote:
Can someone please, pretty please with sugar on top, explain the point behind high power density?
Raw real estate is cheap (basically, nearly free). Increasing power density per sqft will *not* decrease cost, beyond 100W/sqft, the real estate costs are a tiny portion of total cost. Moving enough air to cool 400 (or, in your case, 2000) watts per square foot is *hard*.
I've started to recently price things as "cost per square amp". (That is, 1A power, conditioned, delivered to the customer rack and cooled). Space is really irrelevant - to me, as colo provider, whether I have 100A going into a single rack or 5 racks, is irrelevant. In fact, my *costs* (including real estate) are likely to be lower when the load is spread over 5 racks. Similarly, to a customer, all they care about is getting their gear online, and can care less whether it needs to be in 1 rack or in 5 racks.
To rephrase vijay, "what is the problem being solved"?
I have not yet found a way to split the ~10kw power/cooling demand of a T1600 across 5 racks. Yes, when I want to put a pair of them into an exchange point, I can lease 10 racks, put T1600s in two of them, and leave the other 8 empty; but that hasn't helped either me the customer or the exchange point provider; they've had to burn more real estate for empty racks that can never be filled, I'm paying for floor space in my cage that I'm probably going to end up using for storage rather than just have it go to waste, and we still have the problem of two very hot spots that need relatively 'point' cooling solutions. There are very specific cases where high density power and cooling cannot simply be spread out over more space; thus, research into areas like this is still very valuable. Matt