The Heat Is On
By Esther Shein
A strange thing happened when St. Louis, Mo.-based Sisters of Mercy Health System began populating its data center with new servers. "We ran out of power capacity,'' says Bill Hodges, director of the data center at Mercy, the ninth largest Catholic healthcare system in the country. Mercy found that the servers were smaller and denser and took up less space. But on the flip side, they required more power and cooling, as well as a bigger generator to handle the increased load.
Then the domino effect kicked in. "Now I have to increase the capacity of the infrastructure that supports the data center,'' says Hodges. "You fix one thing, but then there are four other areas you have to upgrade to leverage what the technology changes are allowing you to do."
With a trend toward smaller servers and blade servers, enterprises are now able to get more hardware into a single rack than ever before. However, they're finding that improvement to be a double-edged sword because the smaller server size equals greater power consumption. And if companies don't upgrade to accommodate the new equipment, they'll find themselves only able to use a fraction of their data center's floor space.
"We're seeing increased density in data centers because more CPUs are being packed into a unit of volume,'' explains Dan Golding, a vice president and senior analyst with Tier1 Research in New York City. "Each chassis is taking up a tremendous amount of power to do its computing. One of the laws of engineering is if you take in a lot of power to do computation, something has to be done with that power, which is turned into heat eventually." (article continues)
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