In a response to rising commodity costs, Emerson Network Power announced today that it would increase prices on its Liebert and Knurr brand products.

The increase averages 5% and is the result of “significant cost increases in many of the materials used in the products we manufacture,” according to a statement from Chuck Spears, the president of Liebert North America.

In a downturn economy, the upped prices tend to end up on the user’s balance sheet. Let us know if you’ve received similar notifications from other vendors.

Oracle too: A reader pointed out to me that Oracle recently increased their software licensing costs, in some cases by as much as 15 percent. Why? According to Forrester analyst Ray Wang, it’s due to the devaluation of the U.S. dollar.

There are plenty of ways to start measuring your data center’s Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, which is a comparison of the total facility power to the IT load. But in recent months Microsoft has opened the curtains on its own operations, thanks largely in part to two data center pros there, Michael Manos and Christian Belady.

Back in April, Manos spoke to us about Microsoft’s data center strategy. It was one of the first times the Redmond, Wash. The next month, Manos showed us a demo of Scry (video here), the tool the company uses to measure everything in their data centers.

Now Manos and Belady have written a series of three lengthy blog posts on PUE, why it’s important, and how to go about measuring it. For those of you out there still a little daunted by the task of measuring key analytics in your data center facilities, this could give you a good start.

When it comes to data center metrics the one most often talked about is square footage. Nobody ever announces that they’ve built a facility with Y-tons of cooling, or Z-Megawatts. The first metric quoted is X-square feet. Talk to any data center manager however and they’ll tell you that floor space is completely irrelevant these days. It only matters to the real estate people. All that matters to the rest of us is power and cooling - Watts per square foot. How much space you have available is nowhere near as important as what you can actually do with it.

If you look at your data center with a fresh eye, where is the waste really happening?

Since liquid-cooled servers are at the far right-hand side of the bell curve, achieving electrical density for the majority of us is usually a matter of effectively moving air. So what is REALLY preventing the air from moving in your data center? I won’t rehash the raised floor vs. solid floor debate (since we all know that solid floors are better) but even I know that the perforated tiles, or the overhead duct work is not the REAL constraint. A lot of folks have focused a lot of energy on containment; hot aisle containment systems, cold aisle containment systems, and even in-row supplemental cooling systems.

In reality however, all of these solutions are addressing the environment around the servers, not the servers themselves which are after all, the source of all the heat. Why attack symptoms? Let’s go after the problem directly: The server.

First of all, the whole concept of a “rack unit” needs to be discarded. I’ve ranted before on the absurdity of 1U servers, and how they actually decrease data center density when deployed as they are currently built. I’d like to take this a step further and just get rid of the whole idea of a server case. Wrapping a computer in a steel and plastic box, a constrained space, a bottleneck for efficient airflow is a patently absurd thing. It was a good idea in the day of 66 Mhz CPUs and hard drives that were bigger than your head, but in today’s reality of multi-core power hogs burning like magnesium flares it is just asking for trouble. Trouble is what we’ve got right now. Trouble in the form of hot little boxes, be they 1U or blade servers. They are just too much heat in too constrained spaces.

Virtualization won’t solve this problem. If anything it will just make it worse by increasing the efficiency of the individual CPUs making them run hotter more of the time. Virtualization might lower the power bills of the users inside the server, but it won’t really change anything for the facility that surrounds the servers in question. The watts per square foot impact won’t be as big as we hoped and we’ll still be faced with cooling a hot box within a constrained space.

So here is my challenge to the server manufactures: Think outside of the case.

This isn’t a new idea really, nor is it mine. We’ve all seen how Google has abandoned cases for their servers. Conventional wisdom says that only a monolithic deployment such as a Google data center can really make use of this innovation. Baloney. How often does anyone deploy single servers anymore? Hardly ever. If server manufacturers would think outside of the case, they could design and sell servers in 10 or 20 rack unit scale enclosures. They could even sell entire racks. By shedding cases altogether, both server cases and blade chassis, they could create dense, electrically simple, easy to maintain, and most importantly easy to cool servers. The front could be made of I/O ports, fans, and drives. Big fans for quiet efficiency. The backs could be left open, with electrical down one side and network connections down the other. Minimize the case itself to as little as possible… think of Colin Chapman’s famous directive about building a better race car: “Just add lightness.” The case of a server should serve one purpose only: To anchor it to the rack. Everything else is a superfluous obstruction of airflow. No need for steel, as plenty of lighter weight materials exist that can do the job with less mass.

Go look in your data center with this new eye and envision all those server cases and chassis removed. No more artificial restriction of airflow. Your racks also weigh less than half of what they do today. You could pack twice the computing horsepower into the same amount of space and cool it more effectively than what you have installed.

Ten years from now we’ll look back at servers of this era and ask ourselves “what were we thinking??” The case as we know it will vanish from the data center, much like the horse and buggy a century before. We’ll be so much better without them.

Data center power and cooling services companyAPC is offering a number of free online tools, called APC TradeOff Tools, that give IT pros a way to view how infrastructure changes effect costs and performance in the data center.

“The tools answer questions like, ‘what will the ROI be if I increase the water chiller temperatures?’ or ‘what do I need to do to hit my energy efficiency or carbon footprint target’?,” said Neil Rasmussen, senior vice president of innovation for APC.

The West Kingston, RI-based company’s new tools include the power efficiency calculator that allows IT managers to generate “what if” scenarios regarding virtualization, power sizing, efficiency, power density, and cooling decisions.

Another new tool is the Data Center Carbon Calculator, which allows users to input data about their infrastructure and see the impact any changes would have on data center efficiency, energy costs and carbon footprint.

“If a company makes a carbon efficiency pledge, they can use this tool to drill down into different ways to achieve that goal,” Rasmussen said.

The Data Center Capital Cost Calculator details the impact of physical infrastructure design changes on capital costs; the Virtualization Energy Cost Calculator shows the impact of server virtualization and data center design choices on energy and space savings; and the Data Center Power Sizing Calculator gives details about the impact of server and storage configurations on IT load capacity and required utility input power.

There is also the Data Center AC vs. DC Calculator, which compares the efficiency of each, and the Data Center InRow Containment Selector, which recommends cooling options based on the data center infrastructure.

All of the tools can be accessed here on APC’s website.

 Trends in data center power was the topic at AFCOM New England Chapter’s meeting this week, and apparently it’s a subject that resonates with members—at least judging by the nearly 100 attendees who showed up. (As the New England chapter enters its third year, President Rocko Graziano, whose real job is manager of infrastructure operations and services at L.L. Bean, said this was the largest meeting yet). Two speakers gave the audience their take on the some emerging trends they see taking shape.

Rudy Kraus, CEO of Validus DC Systems, a provider of direct current (DC) power infrastructure for data centers and telecommunications facilities, naturally sees a bright future for data centers powered by DC rather than AC-based electricity. Kraus cited a number of statistics from the likes of the Uptime Institute and McKinsey outlining just how much power data centers can save by switching to more efficient DC power. If data centers in the United States converted only 10% of their capacity to DC power, that would eliminate $1 billion in electric bills. The co2 emissions for a 10 megawatt data center with 17,500 servers would drop from 99,776,400 pounds to 59,865,840 pounds. Kraus invited members of the audience to do their own comparison by visiting an online calculator offered by Intel that analyzes facility-level efficiency of AC and DC servers.

The other speaker, Brian Ouellette, of J.S. Fleming Associates, a provider of power and cooling systems, spoke about the five power trends heading to a data center near you. The top trend, that energy efficiency is gaining importance, is pretty self-evident. The other four trends centered on ways to make data centers more efficient: New ways to scale UPS architectures into adaptive models that can adjust to changing power requirements; two-stage power distribution that reduces restrictions to cooling air flow, among other benefits; increasing use of monitoring with tools such as smart power strips (that monitor in-rack power) and branch circuit monitoring (that monitor each PDU output circuit). Ouellette also pointed out that data centers don’t have to go high-tech in order to become more efficient. When Ouellette asked the audience whether they use blanking panels in their data centers, only five people raised their hands. “Blanking panels are a great way to get the air where you need it,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ll get cross-contamination of air from your hot aisle and cold aisle.”

Alan Warn, a data center manager at ABN AMRO who I spoke to last week for a story on CFD modeling in the data center, also had some things to say about Cisco switches and EMC storage devices.

Neither are new issues for data center facility managers, but they bear repeating. A popular Cisco LAN switch, the Catalyst 6500, blows its hot air out the sides, wreaking havoc on facility managers who are trying to arrange a hot-aisle, cold-aisle configuration in their data center.

“Cisco switches are getting harder and harder to cool,” Warn said. “Their processing equipment, the cooling runs side-to-side. It’s just madness.”

Last year, we asked Doug Gourlay, Cisco’s senior director of data center solutions, about that exact issue in a Q&A we had with him. His answer? The Catalyst 6500 is actually offered in a front-to-back airflow configuration as well, but many data centers don’t buy it because you can’t fit as many ports into it as in the side-to-side version. The bottom line is that if you buy Cisco switches, you have sacrifice either proper airflow or port density, neither of which is very attractive.

Warn said he is looking at some APC cabinets that have special fans to take air from the sides and force it out the back.

Terry Rodgers, an associate partner at data center consultancy Syska Hennessy, recently wrote to us regarding our story on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling. He said that CFD modeling is too expensive to be used by data center managers simply to tell them that they should be following best practices on reducing bypass airflow.

“Why pay tens of thousands of dollars to find out that yes, you should follow accepted best practices?” he wrote. “CFD is not necessary to identify and seal cable cutouts, holes in the data center perimeter, use blanking panels in racks, and remove perf tiles from the hot aisle.”

He added that CFD isn’t even necessary to finding hot spots in the data center. “Just walk around and check and take a temperature sensor with you.”

The better strategy, he argued, is to correct all of those airflow issues that you can, and then use CFD modeling to help you rearrange server cabinets, for example, or determine whether your air conditioning units are providing the airflow pressure that they should.

“Another use for CFD is to validate design strategies before proceeding with costly construction,” he wrote. “But to tell me to seal cable cutouts???”

We agree. A CFD analysis can cost a pretty penny and should be used primarily to pick up the more nuanced cooling issues in your data center, the ones not easily seen with the naked eye. When half of your floor tile is gone to get some cables through it, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist analyzing complex algorithms to determine that you’ve got to fill them up. Thanks to Rodgers for writing in.

Does this look familiar? A SearchDataCenter.com reader (who shall remain anonymous) sent these pictures in from his facility and let me post them here. You can click on the images to get the full-size version. His data center is currently in the midst of some CRAC maintenance, and this duct work is the result. Anyone else out there have similar experiences going on (past or present)?

Chuck Goolsbee, blogger and data center manager, is multi-talented: The guy can put together a slick video too — check out the installation of a new rooftop HVAC unit at Seattle-based hosting company Digital Forest in this video. Make sure you’ve got the volume cranked. The music rocks.  

In this podcast, Uptime Institute and ComputerSite Engineering Inc. guru Pitt Turner explains the difference between sensible and latent cooling in the data center. Latent cooling in the data center results in wasted energy. Turner outlines how to avoid spending more energy and money to cool servers than is necessary in this podcast from the Uptime Institute Data Center Design Charrette.

 

 Servers don't sweat: Sensible and Latent cooling: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download