Power and Cooling Feature Story

It's hard not to be alarmed by the current headlines found in the press. "Uncool Data Centers Need To Chill Out", "Data Centers Give Intel Static over Electric Bills", "Oil prices hit record above $74!”, “Average gasoline prices are expected to top $3”, if they haven't already!

So what does this mean to you in the data center? Chances are that in the coming summer months, you will have to pay higher energy prices to power and cool your data center. Chances are, electricity and air conditioning charges will grow to be a make-or-break consideration. And the business continues to demand more from its IT investments. Something has got to give.

Data centers were traditionally architected for the power consumption and cooling of 2-3kW per rack, and a modern, state-of-the-art data center is possibly capable of up to 5kW per rack. Today’s high-performance servers consume dramatically more power per rack than was originally intended for these environments. The MHz “arms race” has led to an admirable effort to keep pace with Moore's law, and as the number of transistors on a given piece of silicon has doubled every two years, so has power consumption and cooling costs mushroomed. Consider that:

• A typical 1U AMD Opteron™ / Intel® Xeon™ server consumes approximately 300 - 400 watts, and a typical rack of 24 1U servers would consume between 7.2 - 9.6 kW.

• A Dell™ PowerEdge™ Blade Server can accommodate up to 60 blade servers in a 42U enclosure, each consisting of 10 blade servers in a 7U tray, resulting in 5,066 watt per 7U tray; multiplied by six, for a maximum of 30.4kW per rack.

• Data centers are being forced to going back to complex liquid cooling. Liquid cooled racks have become available from multiple vendors and systems such as Egenera® BladeFrame® can be housed in liquid cooled racks with a design specification of cooling some 20,000 Watts with only 12 processor cores per square foot.¹

Enter Network Attached Processing

Network attached processing delivers revolutionary power, cooling, and density characteristics with cost reductions that can pay for the project within the same budget cycle. For online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads that are at the core of business, this means permanent savings for the enterprise.

At the foundation of network attached processing is the industry’s first 24-way 64-bit multicore processor architecture that does not expose its binaries to end user applications. Each chip has 24 cores and is optimized specifically for virtual machine workloads. Azul can put up to 16 of the chips in its 384-way compute appliance with 256 GB of memory and fits into an 11U footprint - making it the world’s largest SMP. Yet it requires very little power consumption: e.g. a fully populated Azul Compute Appliance with N+1 redundant, hot pluggable power supplies and fans, consume a surprisingly 2.7 kW which is roughly equivalent to 64-100 Xeons, which consume between 17-25 kW; that’s 6-10 times improved power efficiency.

Typical current microprocessors operate at well over 200°F which must be cooled down by conventional refrigerated ambient air to operating temperatures between 70-95°F, a temperature reduction of over 100°F compared to the Azul company’s Vega™ processor which operates at less than 100°F already, resulting in considerable savings in cooling costs. Read more »

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¹ http://news.com.com/2102-1010_3-6030145.html or
Emerson Network Power and Egenera Introduce CoolFrame Integrated Cooling Solution for Egenera BladeFrame System, January 24, 2006, http://www.egenera.com/press_releases.php