The Data Center Arm’s Race will resurrect Chilled Water
Power crunches are but one of a number of important issues facing both existing and planned data centers. It’s clear that both Google and Microsoft are attempting to locate new data centers at the confluence of the fiber connectivity and cheap electricity costs prompting some to call this the new data center arm’s race.
To understand the problem, consider that all computer equipment converts electricity to heat. That means in addition to the electricity these systems consume, additional electricity is required to power the computer room air conditioners that exhaust this heat. The primary method used for this process is the movement of cooled air over the equipment, sometimes referred to as air-side cooling.
And it’s this inefficient thermodynamic process that is at the root of the cooling crisis found in the data center. Couple this with wide-spread ignorance on how to efficiently manage an air-side data center with vendors who offer “solutions” to move more air and you’ve got a disappointing prescription for business as usual.
Predictably, this lesson has already been learned but not remembered. As of this writing the laws of thermodynamics have not been superceded. This means that if you want to reduce the consumption of electricity in the data center, you need to more efficiently dissipate the heat. This means abandoning air-side cooling in favor of something that used to cool those large mainframes quite efficiently — chilled water.
IBM stands to benefit quite nicely from this new arm’s race in the data center on a number of fronts including the cooling problem. I’m certain they even remember how they solved the problem the first time.
