Servers you can cook with

Everybody knows that one of the biggest consumers of electricity in data centre is the air conditioning system. There are two main avenues for reducing the cost of air conditioning, either make the air conditioning system more efficient so that it consumes less electricity, or remove the requirement to use so much air conditioning in the first place by running your data centre hotter.

It looks like running the data centre hotter is gaining some ground. The Rackable CloudRack C2 is a new server that can run safely at temperatures around 40°C rather than the more normal range of 20 to 23°C.

The main problem is that, just having one component of your data centre capable of running at high temperatures isn’t terribly useful. Expect to see a lot more manufacturers releasing high temperature capable equipment. Cost in the data centre is bound to be a button pusher for a lot of data centre managers in these recessionary times.