Everything we take for granted – the Internet, the Cloud, all that on demand media, stock markets, your checking account balance – has a physical reality in a place called a data center. We are as dependent on them as we are on our most critical pieces of infrastructure – power plants, water treatment facilities, hospitals. And it wasn’t always this way.
An early installation of a Tandem NonStop I computer in a data center, courtesy HP
“The idea of a stand alone data center is a more recent development in the history of computing,” says Bill Kosik, lead data center energy technologist at Hewlett-Packard. Like the earliest power plants, data centers were originally purpose-built, and attached to the businesses they served, be they steel plants, office buildings or automobile factories.
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Rob Taylor, director of infrastructure technology outsourcing in HP’s enterprise services wing, remembers graduating to his first data center from what had literally been a closet. The center was full of equipment from IBM but also Data General and Digital Equipment Corporation equipment – at that time, the second-largest computer manufacturer in the world.
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At that time, says Taylor, “the data center was a place where, if you needed cooling and power, you went to go and get it. We didn’t think about the future; we were just trying to think about a place to put our stuff.”
Kosik remembers a time when the IBM 360 mainframe was ubiquitous. These water-cooled behemoths would occasionally literally spring a leak, and “they were not waterproof,” says Kosik. Burst hoses and leaking valves would lead to an immediate shutdown and a visit from a technician. In case of a failure in the building cooling system, the IBM 360 even had an optional bolt-on water storage tank.
The physics of convective heat transfer haven’t changed in the decades since, which is why water cooling is making a slow comeback, says Kosik. For supercomputing clusters with extremely high power density – up to 100 kilowatts per cabinet of servers – it’s a must. Circulating water is simply too effective, compared to air, at carrying heat away from where it’s not wanted.
“Computers are not getting less power intensive,” says Kosik. “It will force a move to water cooling eventually.”
Kosik cautions, however, that there are significant capital expenses associated with running a secondary web of water pipes through a building, and he believes we’ll always have air cooled computers of some kind or another in data centers.
That could be because data centers themselves are slow to change – even as computers become more sophisticated, legacy systems remain entrenched.
“We still run every generation of technology [in our customer’s data centers], and we don’t see that changing,” says Doug Oathout, vice president of marketing in HP’s converged infrastructure division. “It isn’t all moving to one thing or another,” he adds.
