Digital Sense plans two massive data centres

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 18 March 2008 04:36

IT Industry - Market

He says that electricity utilities simply cannot deliver the power demands of large data centres in the short term: it can take several years to install new high voltage cables and build a new sub station.

This, he says, is having two major impacts on the market: pushing organisations to use commercial data centres, which have the power, space and data centre infrastructure to support their demands and can deliver in the short term; and forcing data centre managers to optimise the energy efficiency of their existing data centres.

Spiteri says that for every watt of power consumed by the servers in a data centre about three watts of incoming power are required: to cover losses in voltage conversation and ancillary systems and, in particular in the equipment needed to cool the IT equipment.

So, he says data centre operators need a comprehensive plan starting with maximising the energy efficiency of IT equipment, to minimise the overall efficiency of their data centres.

Another development that is driving data centre technologies is "peak lopping". Electricity costs per kilowatt however increase significantly as more power is consumed, so at some point it becomes cost effective for a data centre to cut in its own back up generators, and earn revenue by feeding any excess capacity back into the grid.

Mark Deguara, national product manager at Emerson Network Power Australia, says that true high-density facilities pose multiple challenges, not least being able to manage and support the extreme levels of electrical power that high-density equipment consumes: all of which ends up as heat that must be removed.

 "Australian companies are demanding computer power an order of magnitude more powerful than what they were using only a few years ago – high-density blade servers processing millions of transactions per second to keep them globally competitive," said Deguara. CONTINUED