Help with High Density Cooling

The power consumed, and heat generated, by the equipment housed in a single server rack enclosure can vary dramatically. Modern servers may demand as much as 20 kW of cooling per rack, approximately 10 times the average rack power in existing data centers. With most data centers designed to cool an average of 2 kW per rack, innovative strategies must be used to guarantee proper high density cooling.

The simple answer to this problem would be to provision a data center so that it is capable of providing 20 kW of redundant power and high density cooling to every enclosure. Unfortunately, this is not easily achieved, nor economically practical in most cases. However, there are a variety of solutions that allow high density computing equipment to be effectively deployed in conventional environments.

PTS encourages our customers to focus on the purchase of IT equipment based on functionality provided per Watt and ignore the physical size of the IT equipment. While designing entire data centers for high density remains impractical, data centers can support the limited installation of such equipment by using supplemental high density cooling systems, using rules to allow the borrowing of neighboring underutilized capacity, and by spreading the load among multiple enclosures.

Making the wrong choices when specifying a data center for high density cooling operations can needlessly increase the lifetime cost of the physical infrastructure exponentially. High density servers present a significant cooling challenge, but the experts at PTS can easily design efficient, cost-effective cooling strategies that match your needs.