Re: cooling door

[Alex Pilosov <alex () pilosoft com>]

On 29 Mar 2008, Paul Vixie wrote:

> page 10 and 11 of <http://www.panduit.com/products/brochures/105309.pdf>
> says there's a way to move 20kW of heat away from a rack if your normal
> CRAC is moving 10kW (it depends on that basic air flow), permitting six
> blade servers in a rack.  panduit licensed this tech from IBM a couple
> of years ago.  i am intrigued by the possible drop in total energy cost
> per delivered kW, though in practice most datacenters can't get enough
> utility and backup power to run at this density.  if "cooling doors"
> were to take off, we'd see data centers partitioned off and converted to
> cubicles.
Can someone please, pretty please with sugar on top, explain the point
behind high power density? 


Raw real estate is cheap (basically, nearly free). Increasing power
density per sqft will *not* decrease cost, beyond 100W/sqft, the real
estate costs are a tiny portion of total cost. Moving enough air to cool
400 (or, in your case, 2000) watts per square foot is *hard*.

I've started to recently price things as "cost per square amp". (That is,
1A power, conditioned, delivered to the customer rack and cooled). Space
is really irrelevant - to me, as colo provider, whether I have 100A going
into a single rack or 5 racks, is irrelevant. In fact, my *costs*
(including real estate) are likely to be lower when the load is spread
over 5 racks. Similarly, to a customer, all they care about is getting
their gear online, and can care less whether it needs to be in 1 rack or
in 5 racks.

To rephrase vijay, "what is the problem being solved"?

[not speaking as mlc anything]