Quoting "Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
And in ours (overall IT admin & "owners" of the data center into which faculty are stuffing ever more, ever denser, ever more powerful and power-hungry servers), power is very important. We literally only have so much electrical power to the building. We're also limited in how much heat we can realistically remove from the room.
Oh I know.. we care about power and heat too. But usually the need for speed wins. :) We actually had SDG&E tell us they couldn't supply the amount of power we initially wanted in our new data center that's being built now... now that's scary. So we had to scale down. Odds are we won't build more in town, power is just too expensive. The tower going up next to this smaller building is going to have solar all over it too.. something I think we'll be seeing more and more of, especially in CA. The good thing about that is hopefully more companies will put solar on to help with power, which will in turn, lower the cost to manufacture solar panels. Then they'll be more affordable for homeowners and more of us can get solar too. Either something like that better happen, or they better start building more power generation in this state. We're going to be bringing a bunch of new stuff into this new data center at 480volt power too. More efficient and less heat generated in the racks when power is distributed in them. I should note, we had at least two data centers already, where we "filled" the room, with tons of physical space left. We had used all the power and cooling available and actually had to start moving hosts to another, refurbished room with the power and cooling needed. Part of the problem is that the older DCs were built with the specs for computers at the time, and no one thought that they wattage per sqft would ever increase as fast as it did. We've got single racks that are 22kW already.. up from something like 2kW max just a couple years ago. The new cooling racks that are being developed in different places, many using water (yay.. water in the DC) are interesting. -- Mike Marion-Unix SysAdmin/Staff Engineer-http://www.miguelito.orgMarge: "Homer, sitting that close to the TV can't be good for you." Homer: "Talking while the TV's on can't be good for you!" ==> Simpsons -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
