DataCenter Dynamics – London November 2007
I attended the Datacenter Dynamics conference in London last week. As the name suggests this was about data centres, and in particular about the facilities such as power and cooling. There were some good presentations and the underlying themes of almost all the presentations was about Green computing. The important thing being that this is by actually gaining efficiencies in the data centre equipment rather than just buying electricity from a green supplier.
Including more efficient cooling, better cold isle management and consolidation and virtualisation of the servers, using blade servers and high density servers.
Whilst the idea of high density servers sounds good for a data centre where you have control over the design this can be difficult to implement in a mixed data centre environment where there could be a variety of different customer requirements across the data centre floor. If you designed a high density cooling environment then it would be very wasteful for the customers that didn’t require that amount of cooling. There are however ways of providing more localised cooling to just a few racks.
It seams there is going to be a lot of focus in the coming years for increasing the efficiency of the data centre.