In a recent Gartner presentation on “Infrastructure and Operations: Top 10 Trends to Watch,” Gartner Managing VP Ray Paquet noted the impact of increasing computing density on the data center. One interesting graphic showed that while the installed base of new servers has held fairly steady at 50 billion over the past six years, power and cooling purchases have more than doubled during the same time period. This is quite a testament to the trend toward high density, high use of floor space, and the need for cooling devices to contain the heat and energy usage in the data center.

Gartner’s Top 10 Trends to Watch:
1. Virtualization Is Just Beginning
2. Big Data — The Elephant in the Room
3. Energy Efficiency and Monitoring
4. Unified Communications — Extended
5. Staff Retention and Retraining
6. Social Networks — Ready or Not
7. Legacy Migrations — Your Users
8. Compute Density — Scale Vertically
9. Cloud Computing
10. Converged Fabrics

Gartner noted that organizations are contending with cores doubling every two years, racks continuing to get denser, and a movement toward smaller data centers with greater density. Paquet noted that a typical data center can consume 40 times more energy than the offices it supports. That’s a big imbalance that needs to be addressed – and Gartner says that monitoring and reporting on energy consumption will be mandated by 2012, involving the EPA in the U.S. and the EU in Europe. As Gartner says, “The power issue is moving up the food chain.”

Data center managers are beginning to map server growth to the energy and cooling required by those servers.
You can view the complete Gartner presentation here. We would love to hear your thoughts.

Green (Energy Efficient) Data Centers

A data center needs multiple technologies and know-how to make it energy efficient. One part of a data center may have low-power servers, while another part may have high-density causing intensified heat. Those two sections require different technologies and operational practices. It is also important to set the right temperature for the whole data center.

We find that professionals involved in data centers are often very technical and motivated to try out new things. After initial experimentation in test labs, it follows that technology innovation can be brought inside data centers and results will be shared in open-source forums. Because power alone occupies one-third of data center operating expenses, and power and space combined take 70 percent of operating expenses, including power to fuel servers and cool them, giants likes Yahoo and Google need to innovate to reduce the power it takes to run their data centers.

Depending upon which data you refer to, electricity-driven cooling comprises 30–60 percent of the power consumed at a typical data center.

AFCO’s scalable systems provide a holistic approach to data center resource management by seamlessly integrating intelligent management tools with state-of-the-art power and thermal controls to:

• - Greatly increase the utilization of existing power and cooling infrastructure, reducing the need for future datacenter builds
• - Maximize the amount of power coming in for IT applications
• - Allow efficient and effective deployment of higher density data centers
• - Allow easy integration with existing management tools to lower your overall TCO

There is a new trend in the data center that we’re following—a very energy efficient server (a small one with a light footprint designed specifically for mild computing workloads) that can operate in a wide range of temperatures and humidity levels. This promises to be the “server of the future” for data centers. The current trend for these energy efficient data center servers is to assume application-specific roles or point solutions. But they’re gaining in both processing power and popularity.

The Intel Atom processor is one of the technologies in this space. Another player is ARM, whose business model is based on licensing their technology to multiple chip makers.  ARM processors are at the heart of many mobile and smart phone devices. AMD is in the mix as well.

We note, however, that even though new low-power chips are coming into the data center, they still need to be monitored and provided appropriate cooling.  And, they don’t appear to be good processors for things like virtualization, which is a data center mainstay, of course.

Another recent trend is to use video/graphic processors or GPUs for extended standard processing power. China’s new supercomputer uses these processors as the core of the machine.  Amazon is looking at GPU in the cloud, and it’s no surprise that major graphics vendors like nVidia are hot on this technology.

We think that dense blade servers will continue to be the choice of intensive processing applications for the foreseeable future.  They, too, continue to benefit from AFCO’s patented cooling enclosure systems.  But we’re encouraged by the focus on innovative computing methods and their impact on power and cooling in your data center.