System News has a great post this week highlight results of a demonstration that compared the effectiveness of a variety of cooling solutions in an actual datacenter running Sun V20s. This is the kind of thing that is getting a lot of attention these days.
A copy of Nelson’s presentation can be found here and the final Accenture/SLVG report here. All of the case studies can be found here, including the Sun Modular Cooling Test, “The Chill Off.”
…In the end, Nelson writes that he found a number things that stood out the most this test:
- All of the modular cooling solutions are more efficient than traditional datacenter designs.
- As an industry, we need to keep pushing the inlet temperatures higher. Our server fans did not kick into higher speed even with an inlet temperature of 80 degrees F.
- If we can get these temperatures higher, it opens a huge amount of the world to economizers.
Very interesting.