It's All About Power

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Disaster Recovery Planning

It's All About Power

5/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

New Products Accommodate Changes in the Data Center

FIVE YEARS AGO, when Chris Turner, sales manager in the public sector division of American Power Conversion, was selling backup power devices (such as UPS units) into data centers, racks held a maximum of 2 to 4 kilowatt-hours of power requirement. Since that time, with the proliferation of blade and other minimalist server hardware, more and more equipment is being squeezed into the same amount of space. Now, says Turner, some racks house up to 20 kilowatt-hours of power, which leads to more heat being generated in a very small space. To accommodate the power ramp-ups, vendors in the space now offer cooling solutions to replace traditional perimeter air conditioners that encompass entire rooms. The thinking here: Place the cooled air as close as possible to the source of the heat.

Gary Forbes, power and cooling specialist for CDW-G, points out that every vendor in this end of the business has a different technique and strategy for delivering the optimal cooling. "Some cooling devices reside in the rack itself; some next to it; some on top of it." What determines the best approach, he says, is "how much space you have."

In the case of APC, the InfraStruXure InRow RC cooling solution itself resembles a very narrow rack. It captures heat directly from the rack aisle, and distributes cool air, maintaining equipment temperatures preset to optimal levels.

Forbes says companies in his market space, including his own, also are pushing green solutions which, like hybrid automobiles, can go into energy conservation mode and run even more efficiently. They may take a form as simple as "0U" (or zero U, which means it takes up no height on the rack), or surge strips that can be managed remotely, fit directly on the rack, and measure how much power is being drawn from each device. Or the greener form may be as complex as an entire data center infrastructure which arrives in modular form and can be expanded as data center needs grow.

As APC's Turner explains, to date it has been common for campus technologists to design a data center according to what they thought their power needs would be in five or 10 years, and then size their backup solutions for that escalating scenario. Yet often, he says, "Those power needs never grew to where [campus IT and facilities] thought they'd be, which is very inefficient." He adds that that approach ties up capital and operating funds needlessly. The new methodology: Start with a minimal setup, and then add additional modules only as your needs grow.