nanog mailing list archives

Re: cooling door


From: Henry Yen <henry () AegisInfoSys com>
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:50:07 -0400


Perhaps this is apropos:

      Linkname: Slashdot | Iceland Woos Data Centers As Power Costs Soar
           URL: http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/03/29/2331218.shtml

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 23:29:18PM -0400, Robert Boyle wrote:

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.)

-- 
Henry Yen                                       Aegis Information Systems, Inc.
Senior Systems Programmer                       Hicksville, New York


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