Chillin’ at the HP datacenter

A tour of HP’s test lab datacenter reveals the company’s Dynamic Smart Cooling initiative

The average server rack, however, doesn’t have the luxury of flipping on the nearest cooling apparatus if it’s getting too hot. So the traditional practice has been for datacenter operators to crank up the CRAC (computer room air conditioning) to the point where it feels like a meat locker.

That practice ensures that the hottest-running machines in the joint don’t combust in a fiery explosion of hardware parts and mission-critical data. And even with best practices in place, that blanket-of-cold approach is wasteful from a “dear Lord, look at this month’s energy bill” perspective.

But there’s been some evolution in CRAC technology aimed at easing the pain. HP, for example, has been busily building on its Dynamic Smart Cooling (DSC) technology to help datacenter operators more efficiently chill their hardware on a more granular level, an approach the company says can deliver 20- to 45-percent energy cost savings. That could mean a cool million, depending on how large your facility is. And I had a chance to see DSC in action recently as I took a guided video tour of the datacenter at HP’s test labs in Palo Alto, Calif., led by HP Fellow Chandrakant Patel, one of the DSC developers.

On the tour, I got to see the rows of server racks in HP’s datacenter, all busily humming away — yet the facility itself was surprisingly warm. (Patel likened it to summer in San Francisco, but really, I think it was warmer than that.) That’s the magic of DSC: Affixed to every rack were small, black DSC sensors, which collected air-temperature measurements in real time and delivered them to the DSC’s control node. In response to the readings, the system adjusts cooling, not of the entire facility, but rather just the area of the datacenter where a rack is running especially hot. And after that rack cools down, the CRAC unit for that region adjusts accordingly.

One of the cool tricks with the DSC, according to Patel: You can check on the temperature of your datacenter facility from anywhere, which is a mixed blessing if you’re on a much-needed vacation in Tahiti and get an SMS about an overheating episode.

Patel also told me about HP’s recently unveiled Thermal Assessment Services (TAS). Through TAS, HP measures a datacenter’s thermal conditions to assist customers with planning server-rack placement. By knowing, for example, which regions of the facility get the most cool air, a datacenter admin could know the optimal location for the highest-utilized and hottest-running server racks.

As HP describes it, the maps can help datacenter operators see, for example, where there’s over-provisioning or redundancy in cooling coverage in the room.

I don’t want to give away everything in the video, but I will add that Patel shared with me an interesting chip-cooling technology that HP is working on called ink-jet cooling. It borrows from the technology behind ink-jet printers, but rather than showering paper with ink, small components within servers would shower chips with coolant, as needed. Time will tell just how effective this will be. I wonder about adding yet another delicate part to a server that can break.

Anyway, enjoy the video. Patel’s a very engaging, eloquent, and erudite fellow.