Blade Watch

Computerworld

Computerworld – Next month is the one year anniversary of a guideline by the American Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) that recommend increasing (PDF document) the temperature of air entering servers and other data center equipment. This increase of 77 degrees Fahrenheit to 80.6 degrees may not seem like a big deal, but it took a year-and-half of work to arrive at this recommendation and agreement by most of the major equipment vendors. The person who led the society’s IT team on Technical Committee 9.9 was Roger Schmidt, an IBM fellow and its chief engineer for data center energy efficiency.

Check out this interview talking about the temperature of the data center, a topic I’ve written about and many have spoken about before – for specific applications or tiers how cool do we need to make the data center?  For that resilient grid platform where if a node fails there is no impact, could we not raise the temperature of the data center, reduce our cooling costs and have marginal impact to production? The example I got given was £500,000 saving on cooling a blade farm, with a support contract increase cost of £100,000, and marginal impact to production service, it wont fit all businesses, all applications, but as we move to the data center by tier, where I have a data center for a specific role/business line or application, or even as we change the data center to one of production/development/staging, where I have truly separate environments, we can look at changing the design, the way we manage our data centers in line with the business availability or need.

Related posts:

1. Reducing the carbon footprint of your data center I asked one of the IT Managers to give me...
2. EDS uses free air cooling in data center http://www.cnplus.co.uk/news/business/new-free-air-cooling-technology-used-at-30m-teesside-centre/5211362.article IT services supplier EDS is using Flakt Woods technology...
3. Looking at the data center http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid80_gci1378092,00.html Data center managers are not going “green” out of...
4. HP continue to innovate their data center offering HP L’ISLE d’ABEAU, France, June 18, 2009 – HP today...
5. The green data center and the need to plan for now and for the future E commerce times In today’s world of hybrid cars and...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.