Some time back we had a piece here on the rising utility costs faced by data centres another hey issue faced by them is the "Heat Issue". HP seems to have come out with a range of offerings, designed to help enterprise users deal with power management difficulties. The products, due to ship Feb. 6, include a water-cooled heat exchanger unit which can be attached to the side of a server rack.

Heat issues are being exasperated as users bring more denser servers, including blades, and multicore processors into their data centers, according to Paul Perez, vice president, storage, networking and infrastructure for industry standard servers at HP."Moore's Law is running into the law of physics," Perez said.

To help cool down data centers, HP and IBM Corp. have both turned to an older technology used by mainframes, water cooling, by tapping into existing chilled water supplies within a company's data center or into the entire building's air conditioning system. IBM announced its eServer Rear Door Heat eXchanger, previously codenamed "Cool Blue" back in July 2005. The four-inch thick water-cooled door fits onto IBM's eServer Enterprise rack.

Instead of a door, HP's Modular Cooling System (MCS) is a heat exchanger that attaches to the side of an HP server rack. Perez said the device can cool up to 30 kilowatts of power in a single rack. The exchanger costs $30,500 and can be managed via HP's Systems Insight Manager (SIM) which receive alarms from the device in the event of an accidental water leak.

Source: InfoworldPrashanth RaiTag(s):Data+Center