The Chipset vendors have have been shipping 10G NICs and and components for a few years now. These products are following their own product life cycle, and as predicted the price and power performance has steadily increased. What is truly exciting is the imminent introduction of 10G BASE T as a Lan on motherboard (LOM) technology. In the near term, we are likely to see servers ship with embedded 10G Ethernet interfaces just as they ship today with 1G-included in the price or free with the purchase of your server!

Cool Techniques
Data centers today are complex entities. To ensure a smooth operation, it's absolutely necessary to manage its infrastructure in real-time as a whole, taking various considerations into account. Companies choosing the integrated management approach, will enjoy substantial tangible benefits in both capex and opex of the data center.

S Venkatraman, vice president, enclosure solutions and technical services, APW President Systems says, "Today's organizations are increasingly expecting data centers to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and help the business gain a competitive edge. With the new generation of energy-hungry computer servers, issues of optimizing rack performance in a minimum amount of space has become a major challenge. We offer solutions for thermal management to effectively conserve energy and save money."

Thermal management solutions can be broadly considered under 'low-and-medium' heat density (heat loads up to 10 KW) and 'high heat density' (for heat loads from 10-35 KW). For low and medium heat densities, air-flow management is the key, since any amount of cooling capacity additions for hot spots will result in a higher energy consumption without much benefit in cooling. Air flow problems can be bifurcated into those under the floor and above the floor situations in data centers. The solutions for these problems are different, and have to be carefully worked out for substantial energy savings.

The minimum potential of energy savings on account of air flow management could be in the range of 25-40%. Underfloor air flow issues can be solved using a combination of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) along with simple configured accessories like air balancers, air stops and air risers. Above the floor air flow problems can be resolved using heat containment systems, cold air containment systems, independent containment systems in line with ASHRAE guidelines-which is essentially recommending isolation warm return air from cold supply air in a data center environment.

In high heat density situations, chilled water cooling solutions are ideal, since water has 3,500 times higher density (hence higher heat absorbing capacity). Here the evolution of ingenious solutions like the rear door heat exchanger coupled with a CDU (coolant distribution unit) has been found to deliver up to 50% or higher reduction in energy requirements. Thus, for data center managers faced with increasing pressure to demonstrate energy savings and manage better PUE or DCEE, there are many innovative techniques possible.

According to Ispran Kandasamy, vice president and managing director, CommScope, Asia Pacific, the industry is seeing increased utilization of more energy efficient equipments that help enterprises to save power and cooling costs, which make up a substantial portion of data center operating costs. Subsequently, there is a growing regulatory and industry mandate over the use of green components in hardware and packaging. Enterprises find conformity to these mandates good for their corporate image.

Data center design also helps saving energy and money. Designing data centers is very crucial, catering to the changing market forces. Designing data centers and building infrastructure is always more effective, if there is a good understanding of the future requirements. According to Young, while it is always difficult to predict the future requirements, there are forces like power and cooling costs, processor speed, and information growth in the market that are producing the pressure to change and adapt to the new requirements.

According to Dileep Kumar, director, product management, ADC Krone, in the data center design, thin cables can facilitate better airflow, avoiding cooling process using energy.

In a data center or a populated rack area, wherein patch cords are hanging massively, the air flow gets affected when the patch panels in the front side block the air flow affecting the natural cooling process, and requiring the use of energy.

The Virtual Way
Virtualization technology comes to rescue enterprises by performing the streamlining task of many servers, and increasing their efficiency. This kind of efforts for green technologies make a big impact on society and government organizations. One can follow this and set an example for other private enterprises. For an interesting example, virtualization helped a big Chinese company to bring down its 200 servers to less than ten and saved considerable amount of power. If the technology can do wonders to that Chinese company, all Indian companies also can adopt the technology for their benefit.

Young says, "With virtualization technologies, ten server links can be brought down to one link. Since various business critical applications might be running on this one link, the network must be very robust; and it requires to support the bandwidth. So in this perspective, 10 Gig technology in structured cabling helps organizations to support a huge bandwidth, and consequently there are power savings."

New strategies and applications like vitalizing hardware, cloud computing, application scaling, etc, create requirements for a higher network speed, and reliability for network hardware and the underlying infrastructure. Companies have been working in anticipation of these requirements to develop alternatives to meet these new customer demands.

Integrated Approach
Explosive growth in the number of IP-driven devices and their power requirements in data centers is the order of the day. As components become more sophisticated and complex, 'smart' power strips are introduced. It becomes more and more challenging to manage data center assets, and optimize their yield.

David Frenkel, educational services manager, RiT Technologies says, "Blade servers are gaining popularity as the current best solution for dense power computing. However, density represents a new monitoring challenge, as the larger number of servers per cabinet and additional physical elements-pass through modules, built-in switching modules, etc-increase the monitoring task significantly. Every data center is challenged by the limits of the physical infrastructure-the availability of power, space, cooling, switch ports, etc; thus, putting constraints on the amount of services that the data center can deliver."

Although power management has become a critical focus area, the complexity of today's data centers has made efficient power management almost impossible to achieve, without a sophisticated monitoring system. Frenkel says, "An integrated approach enables optimization of the main data center management processes. Server or equipment provisioning is one of the key processes of data centers' everyday activities."

To perform the provisioning operations effectively and efficiently, the IT/network personnel should plan and implement their actions in close collaboration with many functions within the organization. A responsible manager has to exchange information about his/her planned activities with the IT manager or network personnel to maintain the equilibrium, and spend the organization's resources wisely. When planning the 'install server' activity, the manager will be able to make sure using the unified platform's information, that the new server is placed in the optimal location, making the best use of the 'precious' power and the cooling resources.

When a server goes down, the integrated platform can also instantly provide the IT personnel with its location, along with a wealth of server related information as well as affected services. It will ensure an automated and effective fault management with built-in triggering activities set. For example, when a cabinet is overheated, the system will automatically increase the cooling generation to this cabinet, or alternatively will shut down the air conditioning when conditions do not require it, thus saving money.

Statistics show that the total data centers' power consumption today is about to exceed that of the civil aviation industry. Alongside strict regulations on the power consumption front, this tends to be the #1 concern of the modern data center managers. In addition, the worldwide trend for any type of business nowadays is to 'go green'. To enable the data center meet these challenges, the data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solutions gather real-time power and other environment related parameters, analyzes them, and presents them to the user in the most effective manner. Thus, this facilitates data center managers to create automated action plans for power savings, as well as to immediately recognize any problem, and handle them quickly and effectively.

Kannan K
kannan@cybermedia.co.in

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