Updated Q3 2011: Power And Cooling Heat Up The Data Center

Driven by the confluence of rising energy prices, the immense scaling of many cloud workloads, and continual pressures on IT budgets, power and cooling have become even more critical issues than they were several years ago; in many cases they are the underlying drivers for emerging revolutions in data center architecture and implementation. Improving energy efficiency and solving the problems generated by increasingly dense server form factors is a community effort that requires contributions from semiconductor, system, software, and data center operation vendors. All the primary actors are now fully engaged and have collectively realized that there is money in efficiency, and they will increasingly vie for energy-conscious customers over the next 24 months. For users, this is good news and bad news — an increasing array of technologies will be available to rein in power and cooling problems, but the decision process will become commensurately complex. Meanwhile, you can take simple and effective steps today to both improve your overall operations and plan for future technology.