The average datacentre lasts between 15 and 20 years, so when the current generation of datacentres near the end of their working life, will their replacements be at all familiar?
There was a boom in datacentre construction at the beginning of this decade, which means that millions of dollars worth of server hardware and related equipment still needs to be written off before a major wave of datacentre rebuilding can be expected.
Unfortunately, extrapolating current IT trends into the future is an uncertain exercise because disruptive technologies upset the status quo with considerable regularity.
We always had to design servers for maximum power. We were going the wrong way.
Tony Parkinson HP VP industry standard servers Asia Pacific
That said, the emergence of several macro trends in datacentre design gives us an idea of what will shape server and datacentre design in coming decades.
Going green
With the growing emphasis on green computing, recent innovation around server design has focused on reducing power consumption as a quick way of minimising the carbon footprint of the average datacentre. High-end datacentres, fully loaded with high-density blade servers and companion switches, can now consume as much as 40 kilowatts per rack — many times the rated power consumption of datacentres just a few years ago.
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This level of power consumption not only increases the demand for electricity, it significantly increases the amount of heat coming out of the servers. All this heat must be cooled, using equally expensive and electricity-guzzling air conditioning systems.
For years, "we always had to design servers for maximum power," says Tony Parkinson, Asia-Pacific vice president of industry standard servers with HP, whose server lines range from low-end commodity systems to room-filling high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. "We were going the wrong way. You can just keep building bigger power supplies but then you've got the whole power dynamics to deal with."
These dynamics are forcing many datacentre operators to consider their options.
Last June, Google, Intel and a number of computer component companies launched the Climate Savers Computing Initiative in an effort to increase energy efficiency in PCs. They claimed that around half the electricity used by a modern server is wasted in the AC/DC conversion process.
One potential improvement is moving the thermally inefficient process of AC-to-DC conversion away from individual servers. By giving servers DC-only power supplies — a relatively easy modification — companies can relocate the process of AC-to-DC conversion outside the datacentre, moving hot power supplies outside the datacentre and avoiding the need for air-conditioning systems to be cranked up to compensate.
Various datacentre designs also allow operators to increase ambient air temperature from 18 degrees Celsius to around 22 degrees Celsius, HP's Parkinson says — enabling a massive reduction in the expense and carbon emissions related to air conditioning.
In the long term, such techniques will likely become widespread as environmental considerations become fundamental in datacentre design. This will pave the way for innovations such as water-cooled servers, which replace inefficient server fans with a more effective heat-exchange system. Once common, water-cooled designs fell out....
