CIOs Feel the Heat

The next-generation data center shares two problems with its elders: It’s hungry, and it runs hot.

From the mainframe on, data center managers have struggled with power and heat. Huge quantities of equipment require huge amounts of power. And computers generate significant heat, which increases as equipment gets smaller and denser. And that means more air conditioning and even more power.

Whether an enterprise is trying to free up real estate or trying to cram more equipment into a growing company's existing data center, the result is the same: more power needed, more heat generated.

There aren't many easy answers to these challenges. You can replace older equipment with higher-capacity, higher-performance equipment to at least stem the tide of power usage and heat emission. You can place equipment so that the devices that emit lots of heat have greater airflow or zoned air conditioning around them. Or you could alternate high-heat devices with low-heat ones, a strategy called "hot aisle/cold aisle."

New 30-plus blade servers generate so much heat that they are especially difficult to cool, says John Webster, senior analyst at consultancy Data Mobility Group. Pegasus Solutions CIO Mike Kistner had to use the hot aisle/cold aisle approach with his blade servers. Where possible, he's shifting to compute appliances, a type of multiprocessor device from Azul Systems Inc. that emits much less heat and takes less power. "We save thousands of dollars a month in electricity," Kistner says. But the compute appliance is designed for Java applications, so blade servers are still needed for the majority of Pegasus' enterprise software.

Corrections Corporation of America CIO Brad Wood built a new data center three years ago, with one goal being to avoid heat problems through physical design. "But we still have hot spots," he says. "The new boxes are killers for heat."

In a return to the mainframe past, data centers may need to use water cooling for the new generations of dense, rack-mounted servers and storage systems, says Randy Mott, CIO of data center equipment vendor Hewlett-Packard Co. But that presents another problem: "Lots of people don't have the plumbing in their data center," says IDC analyst Michelle Bailey. "And they are often concerned with leaks destroying the equipment." So CIOs and CTOs will have to keep their cool as best they can.