New Guidelines Aim to Chill Servers

Will a new set of guidelines help data centers stay cool -- and safe?

The priorities of IT staff and facilities engineers are notorious for not being aligned -- leading to downed servers and wasted energy -- but a new set of guidelines and a rating system hope to solve that.

Called "thermal reports," the guidelines from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) will be applied to products like servers, storage, and switches, and will rate components' heat output, nominal and maximum air flow, weight and dimensions, air flow pattern type, components configuration, and environmental class, all divided into five product classes.

The data center management business is famous for conflicts and problems associated with heat and power management. The question is whether these standards will take the lead in improving the situation.

Here's a typical scenario according to Don Beaty, chairman of Atlanta-based ASHRAEs technical committee on mission-critical facilities:"The IT guys go and buy blade servers, but they're not talking to facilities people. They get them [the blade servers] in and they can't cool it. Then they talk to the facilities guy but there’s no budget."

Beaty says 15 of the top datacom equipment manufacturers associated with the ASHRAE technical committee -- companies like IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) -- were consulted in coming up with the guidelines.

"So it's not something that is just wishful thinking," he says. "They wanted to get out some information because they understood there's these kinds of issues."

Beaty said the guidelines will be especially relevant in large data centers and collocation centers, where frequent server changes and rack rearrangements can wreak havoc with facilities engineers' best-laid plans.

Les Yaw, a networking systems technician at Luther College, says the new guidelines are exactly what he needed three months ago. "We put in a whole new ventilation and air conditioning system. Trying to figure out how much heat those things are putting out is just a pain in the ass."Yaw says that instead of estimating the heat output, a set of guidelines with a "box score system" makes things a lot easier.

He cites several examples of the lack of communications between IT and the facilities staff at his college. On one occasion, an open window on a warm day colliding with the air-conditioned data center caused condensation on the painted cement ceiling. "It was literally raining in the server room."

In addition to the new hardware ratings system, IT and facilities managers need empirical evidence to present to executives, such as how much the data center heat levels typically fluctuate in various conditions and over time. "We're working on that," Beaty says. He's hoping the data can be published in a book this winter.

Among the first vendors to use the guidelines system is IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), which included ratings with its eServer 520 in April. "We'll have them all moved over," says Roger Schmidt, chief thermal architect, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., referring to IBM's whole product line.

How will the ratings be implemented? That's still not clear. Schmidt says the rating labels aren't much more complicated than what goes on a typical hot-water heater or dishwasher. Despite all the recent hype about "utility" computing, though, it's not clear whether it will end up as a sticker on a box.Most of the major server vendors will probably follow a course similar to IBM's, ASHRAE's Beaty believes. The hope is for the guidelines to become mainstream within a few years.

— Evan Koblentz, Senior Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum