ALKHOBAR, 12 September 2006 — During this summer’s heat wave, Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) found it very difficult to meet the demand for energy, with brownouts and temporary blackouts affecting may industries in the Kingdom. This highlights the fact that energy efficiency, heat output and the availability and reliability of local energy supplies have become increasingly critical design considerations for data centers.
IT departments are struggling with the increased heat output of densely packed data centers and of dense computing platforms such as blade servers. But what happens when you combine denser, hotter data centers with a global heatwave and tight electricity supplies?
When the power supply is stretched, as occurred on many of the hottest days recently, brownouts and power cuts were the result. In a modern data center, with the enormous heat dissipation needs of dense blade servers, a power cut means relying on generators to power not just the servers, but cooling systems, too. If cooling fails, the servers will overheat and shut down in a matter of minutes.
In other words, at the same time that higher-than-ever availability demands require that data centers be highly resilient to failure, environmental and infrastructure challenges make it harder to ensure reliable power for data centers.
In response to such concerns about data center heat generation and power needs, IBM recently announced its adoption of AMD’s Opteron processor across its entire line of servers, including its blades. Choosing the cooler and more efficient Opteron is part of IBM’s Cool Blue initiative, which aims to reduce power consumption and heat output by up to 40 percent.
IT industry advisory firm, Nemertes Research, believes that enterprises building data centers must make it a priority to consider the environment outside the data center’s walls. Companies should analyze the availability and capacity of local electricity supplies, the potential impact of long-term high heat waves and other causes of higher-than-usual electricity demand by residential and office buildings in the area.
Experts should be consulted for help with location and design decisions and servers should be evaluated on power consumption as well as processing power. Investigate as well the power requirements of servers, VoIP systems, switches and routers when designing data center architecture. In the long-term, electricity will be a substantial expense in data center overhead and adequate planning at the design stage can make a huge difference in cost containment.
