Cooling

Video: IBM unveils hydro-cluster green supercomputer

The product name is the Power 575. IBM is promoting is as a hydro-cluster supercomputer. To paint it green, the literature says the Power 575 requires 80 percent fewer air conditioning units and reduce total cooling costs by 40%. (It’s water-cooled).

Key points discussed at last visit to IBM:

1. Water cooling is 4,000 times more efficient than air cooling.

2. Air cooling has become too expensive and there’s a finite limit to how much power you can bring in.

3. It’s tough to budget ahead for air cooling – power costs are a big unfriendly variable.

4. Heated water is easier to recycle than heated air.

Overheard: Rackspace chiller must have given him nightmares

Since the recent Dallas/Fort Worth data center downtime event, we have been doing a lot of communicating with our customers. Lanham Napier, CEO The Cause, The Response and The Timeline

Without notifying us the utility providers cut power, and at that exact moment we were 15 minutes into cycling up the data center’s chillers. Our back up generators kicked in instantaneously, but the transfer to backup power triggered the chillers to stop cycling and then to begin cycling back up again—a process that would take on average 30 minutes. Those additional 30 minutes without chillers meant temperatures would rise to levels that could irreparably damage customers’ servers and devices. We made the decision to gradually pull servers offline before that would happen. And I know we made the right decision, even if it was a hard one to make.

A chiller is a cooling system that removes heat from one element and deposits into another element. For instance it could remove heat from water and disperse it into the air. A chiller is also a very scary story that can give you nightmares and keep you up at night.

 Rackspace delivers enterprise-class web infrastructure and managed hosting services. They have six data centers and manage more than 22,000 servers.