On 29 Mar 2008, Paul Vixie wrote:
page 10 and 11 of <http://www.panduit.com/products/brochures/105309.pdf> says there's a way to move 20kW of heat away from a rack if your normal CRAC is moving 10kW (it depends on that basic air flow), permitting six blade servers in a rack. panduit licensed this tech from IBM a couple of years ago. i am intrigued by the possible drop in total energy cost per delivered kW, though in practice most datacenters can't get enough utility and backup power to run at this density. if "cooling doors" were to take off, we'd see data centers partitioned off and converted to cubicles.
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"? [not speaking as mlc anything]