About 8 months ago we were faced with an expansion issue where our datacenter upgrade was delayed due to permits. At the time sun had just announced their blackbox, now called the S20. During the road trip I got to walk through one of these. I found the cooling aspect to be very interesting. It works on front to back cooling but has what I would call radiators are sandwiched between each set of racks. From my non-technical point of view on HVAC this seemed to reduce a large amount of wasted cooling seen in large room datacenters. Is this something we might see in future fixed datacenters or is this limited to the portable data center due to technical limitations ? Due to cost we didn't get to use one but I found the idea very interesting.
I take exception to "wasted cooling" ... Are you saying the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to heat generated by servers? I can understand and appreciate the thought process of bad airflow design, ie, no hot or cold rows, or things of that nature. But you can't really waste AC. We're doing a small test deployment of a dozen or so Chatsworth chimney style cabinets, with ducted returns. When the system is up and running I will comment on it more, but it seems to make a lot more sense that what we all have been doing for the last 10 years. As for the Sun S20, is it still painted black? :)