Apr 23rd, 2009 |
We’re heading toward May, and where I live (Florida) that means the daytime highs are creeping into the upper 80s, with that magical 90 degree day just around the corner. I was watching the news this morning, and they pointed out that the high in Las Vegas is supposed to be 92 degrees today — it’s nice to know it should be nice and toasty for Interop.
Anyway, the Return to Warmth has me thinking about air conditioning and the critical role it plays in NOCs and data centers. I don’t know if you’ve had the singular pleasure of being in such a room when the air conditioning fails, but I have, and it gets really warm really quickly. I remember when, a few years ago, Brian Chee and I were testing core switches out in his lab. The AC became completely overwhelmed and we ended up with doors to the hall propped open with multiple fans stealing as much cool air from other offices and labs as possible. When Brian spec’ed out the infrastructure for a combined data center for a project documented in InfoWorld’s Pimp My Data Center series, air conditioning took up a huge amount of his time and energy (not to mention the time and energy of a crane operator and a large crew of HVAC professionals).
One of the ways to solve heat load problems is with spot or portable air conditioning units. Our assumption is always that a large central system will be the most efficient, but a spot solution to a spot problem can be both energy efficient and cost effective. If there’s anything the new generation of infrastructure hardware is teaching me, it’s that challenging my existing assumptions is always a good place to start finding a good solution.
Interop exhibitor MovinCool specializes in these smaller AC units, and they’ve already issued four press releases on new products they’ll have on hand in Las Vegas. If you’ve been thinking about air conditioning, too, you might want to head into the conference to sessions like Forecasting: How to Determine What Your Next-Generation Data Center Requires to get a handle on figuring out your next set of data center specs, or Should You Own Your Next Data Center? to find out whether you might be better off avoiding the issue entirely by heading into the cloud. If a data center is definitely in your future, then make sure it’s eco-friendly by listening to the speakers in The Green Data Center: Your Playbook of Eco-Strategies for Today and Tomorrow.
Gee, that’s a lot to think about. I think I’ll go cool off, now. Inside. Where the air conditioning lives.
