CloudRack: The 100 Degree Data Center

[iruleyou05]

already been done. Look at bladecenters.

[wwallender]

Well SLA Batteries Cant Take 100 Degrees

[tecnax]

looks like shit indeed.

[gopenzo]

looks like shit, sorry...

[WinterXL]

@gopenzo "looks like shit, sorry" what are you talking about? why are you posting? idiot.

[crazycarrotguy]

i want one!! seriously looks good though.

[crack1q2]

so, it are actually 3 servers in one case? so it has 3 mainboards? has every mainboard 2 harddrives? thanks :) nice video!

[Si3z3]

ok but cant that increase the dmage that the sever rack will take? i mean atleast a power supply would take some of the damage from a power surge but if its going directly to the rack couldnt it fry the whole rack?

[JonathonReinhart]

@Si3z3 Think of it like this, instead of 1 server = 1 power supply, its essentially 100 servers = 1 power supply. No matter how you look at it, you still have 50-60Hz AC coming to your building, and need low-voltage DC at the motherboard. So certainly, they have very good filtering and protection at the main PSU (probably better than you and I have in our traditional setups).

[darwincollins]

I am guessing that is 100 F ambient air temperature in front of the rack. The processors don't like more than about 90 C. So, you keep them cool by large fans in the back? Or, wait did he say that it should only go up to about 80F?

[tutor432]

put all the data farms in cold climate areas. have ducting open for cold air flow near the bottom and suck out the top. problem solved.

[riceklown]

@tutor432 and what per se are you planning on doing about the humidity? How far from major network nodes will it be?

[Nicko1024]

@riceklown You'll still need chillers for filtration, humidity control, etc. But you use air to air heat exchangers. Its a pretty common to see these in new datacenter design. Also high temp water systems (70-90 degree operational temps), ground loop heat pumps, also some companies have supplemented with thermal/solar tower exhaust designs, or down-draft cool towers to exploit atmospheric pressure differentials.

[bingimar]

Iceland

[srx08]

As others have mentioned, water cooling is far superior to air but is seldom used due to price concerns and other issues. Eg. cooling the raid controllers, hard drives, north bridge, etc.

Companies focus on making greener hard drives and reducing the manufacturing process on CPUs to increase efficiency. Not to mention newer versions of RAM which use less power, eg. 1.65volt DDR3 versus 2.0+ volts of DDR2 memory.

[srx08]

I'm not really a fan of this companies proposals.

First of all, there's a reason why each node in a server rack has power supplies. Its for redundancy. Therefore if a power supply fails, another remains to back up the power and keep the server running.

This power system seems to provide power to each cabinet meaning if it fails, a whole cabinet of racks fails which is 100% unacceptable in a data center or supercomputing cluster.

[Xormithan]

Redundancy can be applied at several levels.

[jdsanchez473]

@srx08 how do you know they have not thought of this and implemented redundancy into there main power supply? I would also assume that that have more than one power supply to convert to 12v. Say they have 6 main supplies, so if one fails it should be able to maintain enough power until the unit is replaced.

[rysliv]

the server has like 8 cpu's

[Surdify]

mmmmm, Putting a hole in the side would mean

a= Not that secure, A vent would probably be ok...

b= Water will allways win because its far more effective than air.

The only thing that would be an efficiant coolant system is, build your datacentre in Alaska, Iceland, Greeland, Russia. Cold places!

[rysliv]

water cooled servers exist. its just more expensive thats why we stick with air

[Xormithan]

The problem is that power tend to be more expensive there. Datacenters are built where power is cheap because most of the time the low cost of power is enough to offset the cooling costs.

[bespoke1]

Why? Put a hole in the datacenter sidewall into your cold isle, seal the hot isle and convectively vent it, and draw fresh air from outside through a filter.

Boom, no water loop, no chillers, simply big fans drawing air into the datacenter. Hot air in the summer afternoons? Run it through an evaporatror on its path into the building.

[nsapia]

How do you cool the cold isles in the middle of the data center?

Evaporative cooling requires a tremendous amount of make-up water (not so "green"), so I doubt that there will be "no water loop". Even Google, who claims to have the most efficient data centers in the world, uses water.

[rwese]

i believe that air cooling wont keep up with water cooling solutions in the next years, anyway, not a bad.