back to article Study: Idiots may cause data-center apocalypse

A new study warns that ignorant data center managers switching to high-density devices are facing a "capacity crisis" that may increase the number of costly server outages. The Aperture Research Institute, a division of software company Aperture Technologies, surveyed over 100 enterprise data managers, representing over 600 …

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  1. Tony Fuller

    Heat Loading in DataCentres

    As well as power and weight heat is another issue with high density installations which can be overlooked; I can give a shameless plug for HP here now I am no longer employed by them in that HP blades have low power consumption and heat output for the computing power they provide compared with their majior competitors.

    Otherwise more air cooling has to be installed which ironically leads to more elctrical power being drawn by the datacentre.

  2. James Cleveland

    Wind Farm

    I remember when I had to do some temp work (moving boxes) and it was in a data center, which happened to have two big rack things of blade servers back to back with each other, about 3m apart. I stood in between them and it was quite an experience, my hair blew everywhere ^_^

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  4. David Harper

    Bring back liquid cooling

    It almost makes you pine for the good old days, when real computers were cooled with water (the IBM 3090) or Fluorinert (the backlit "waterfall" of the Cray-2).

  5. SImon Hobson Bronze badge

    Since when is this news ?

    The same thing has been said time and time again over the years as the boxes have shrunk and density per rack has gone up. Anyone installing or expanding their server racks without considering both the power consumption and heat generation (ie cooling requirements) is, as the headline suggests, an idiot - but there's nothing particularly special about blades, they are just the latest step in the trend towards ever higher density.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HP's blades not so cool

    HP's blades are no cooler than the competition's. See for example

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/15/ibm_retort_blade/

    In terms of performance per watt, Sun's systems clearly have the advantage:

    http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t2000/

    16 to 32 threads running at up to 1.4 GHz. Peak system power consumption ranging from 267W to 333W, depending on system configuration.

    That compares with 216W for only a two processor blade system from HP:

    ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/servers/blades/idc-tco-deployment.pdf

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Global Warming Source Finally Identified

    That's right, you read it here first... Turn your servers & IT Equipment OFF now or we all die!

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