Data Centers; a "hot" topic these days!

posted by Bradley Ellison on November 28, 2006

Although processors, with their new multi and many core architectures, are now focused on performance per watt, and new low power platforms are being announced with increasing frequency by many vendors, the attendant problems surrounding data center capacity planning, design, and management will not go away. They are here to stay.

In the press and at many conferences that I have attended, the collective finger is often pointed at Intel and the processors that we design and manufacture. Our competitors have been quick to seize on this opening and use it to gain market share. Granted, we (the collective we of Intel) have been slow to acknowledge the need for low power consumption designs. As recently as a year ago, there was ongoing debate within Intel’s design engineering community regarding the priority for and value of low power designs vs. “the need for speed” (there may still become pockets of resistance here).

But I would argue that Intel is not the culprit here. It is an industry wide information technology issue!

Our newest processor designs (as well as those of our competition) have clearly comprehended the fundamental marketplace shift requiring lower power consumption with high performance. In spite of this, ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioning Engineers) projections indicate that increases in thermal density of computing equipment in data centers will continue to rise as far out as 2013 (albeit at a bit slower pace). This includes compute platforms and storage devices. Even more striking, the thermal density of high-performance communications equipment is projected to rise to the top of the list of heat producers over the next several years!

In upcoming blogs, I hope to unravel some of the intertwined causes, the implications and some of the current approaches being used to address the issues. Somewhere down this path, I also want to explore the broader implications to business, the economy, and the environment - but then there is whirled peas (World Peace), and this ain’t no Miss America Pageant! ;-)

Bradley (Brad) Ellison Manager, Global Communications Services Information Technology