cooling door

Sun Mar 30 03:29:18 UTC 2008

At 02:11 PM 3/29/2008, Alex Pilosov wrote:
>Can someone please, pretty please with sugar on top, explain the point
>behind high power density?

More equipment in your existing space means more revenue and more profit.

>Raw real estate is cheap (basically, nearly free). Increasing power
>density per sqft will *not* decrease cost, beyond 100W/sqft, the real
>estate costs are a tiny portion of total cost. Moving enough air to cool
>400 (or, in your case, 2000) watts per square foot is *hard*.

It depends on where you are located, but I understand what you are 
saying. However, the space is the cheap part. Installing the 
electrical power, switchgear, ATS gear, Gensets, UPS units, power 
distribution, cable/fiber distribution, connectivity to the 
datacenter, core and distribution routers/switches are all basically 
stepped incremental costs. If you can leverage the existing floor 
infrastructure then you maximize the return on your investment.

>I've started to recently price things as "cost per square amp". (That is,
>1A power, conditioned, delivered to the customer rack and cooled). Space
>is really irrelevant - to me, as colo provider, whether I have 100A going
>into a single rack or 5 racks, is irrelevant. In fact, my *costs*
>(including real estate) are likely to be lower when the load is spread
>over 5 racks. Similarly, to a customer, all they care about is getting
>their gear online, and can care less whether it needs to be in 1 rack or
>in 5 racks.

I don't disagree with what you have written above, but if you can get 
100A into all 5 racks (and cool it!), then you have five times the 
revenue with the same fixed infrastructure costs (with the exception 
of a bit more power, GenSet, UPS and cooling, but the rest of my 
costs stay the same.)

>To rephrase vijay, "what is the problem being solved"?

For us in our datacenters, the problem being solved is getting as 
much return out of our investment as possible.

-Robert

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