Rackable ready to run hot, innovates on power distribution

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Rackable has announced a new scale out computing solution that runs at temps up to 104 degrees F, and moves to per-cabinet (instead of per-server or per-blade) power supplies. The CloudRack 2  refines the CloudRack design announced back in October of last year, which was basically a horizontally mounted cookie sheet with a server on it.

The CloudRack 2 servers don’t have fans (those are moved to the back of the rack itself), and they don’t have power supplies. From a story at internetnews.com

At the same time, it’s taking out the heat-generating power supply that connects to every rack. Instead, the racks connect directly to DC power plugs. So instead of a power supply for each rack, the cabinet itself has one very large AC to DC converter, and all of the racks connect to that converter.

Without the power supplies the new servers are rated to run at up to 104 degrees F (40 degrees C), and the extra room gets used to put 3 servers on a train instead of the 2 found on the original CloudRack

…The result is a cabinet with 99 percent power efficiency because the DC power draw at each rack is exactly what the rack needs at that time. The C2 cabinets can hold up to 1,280 cores, or 320 processors. Rackable offers AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors, and plans to offer the forthcoming Nehalem-EP X55x0 line of Xeons once Intel releases them.

Timothy Prickett Morgan also has coverage at The Register.