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GCN Home > 05/15/06 issue

When data centers lose their cool

As processors get more powerful and servers get hotter, system modernization takes on new urgency

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Data center managers like to say they create weather. They’re not exaggerating.

To prepare for a new supercomputer he’ll oversee, Ramesh Kolluru, director of Louisiana’s Center for Business and Information Technologies, set up an ad hoc data center within his research facility. Two rows of server cabinets, packed with SGI Altix 350 systems, run 15 feet down the center of the lab. When you start walking down the aisle between those racks, the temperature is a pleasant 78 degrees; by the time you reach the end—about seven paces later—the temperature has plunged to a wintry 40.

Lately, the weather inside data centers has grown unmanageably hot, forcing IT managers to reconsider plans they’d taken for granted. And data center modernization—the unglamorous second cousin to today’s business systems modernization—has become essential. Often, an agency can’t successfully complete the latter without seriously considering the former.

“You cannot build data centers like you used to,” said Richard Sawyer, director of data center technology for American Power Conversion Corp. of West Kingston, R.I. That’s partly because modern servers can deliver a lot more processing power in a lot less space than they could a decade ago. While the benefits are immediate, the costs are often more subtle—and over the long run can adversely affect an agency’s ability to accomplish its mission.

At first you might simply notice servers on the top racks failing more often than those at the bottom. You may see groups of servers running hotter than the rest—“hot spots,” as they’re known. You may find you’re running your backup cooling unit around the clock, instead of just for emergencies. Bring in a cadre of blade servers, and suddenly the heat problem grows—as do the electricity bills. At worst, you may end up with entire racks of servers, or “dark clusters,” powered down until electricity and cooling concerns are addressed.

According to Gary Spilde, site planning manager for Mountain View, Calif.-based SGI, “The government has an awful lot of 20- and 25-year-old data centers. Typically, there is a lot of retrofitting to be done.”

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Hardware, Business Process Management, Management, IT Management



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