HP's New Data Center Cooled By Glacial Wind 116
Arvisp writes with this snippet about HP's recently completed datacenter in northeast England, which utilizes the glacial wind blowing off the North Sea to lower temperatures of IT equipment and plant rooms: "The Wynyard takes in the cool air, filters it accordingly and collects it in the management system and is then forced over the front of the server racks before it is exhausted. The result is a hall with a constant temperature of 24C. When the winds become even colder than usual, the exhausted heat is mixed with the outside air to maintain temperatures."
Re:North sea has melted (Score:3, Insightful)
dang, the same thing happened here in North America, the native americans can't walk back to visit their relatives in Mongolia any more. They should have used some forsitght and done "cap and trade" instead of making all those carbon dioxide emitting cooking fires!
Turn the servers 90 (Score:3, Insightful)
Servers are N Units high. Most are 2 or 3 units. So why lie them flat and try to force air front to back when it wants to rise?
Rotate the servers 90 so they are vertical and leave an approx 1U air gap between them.
And while we're reconfiguring the shape of rack servers. Please put the network ports, console ports at the front, the power ports at the back.
Re:Glacial? (Score:2, Insightful)
Glacial obviously just means `cold`, in this context.
Re:Air is not water. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not tricky with the bang-bang type of controller typical of consumer systems which are heating and cooling relatively tolerant loads like people. Where it gets tricky is where you need to maintain a steady state temperature and flow in order to avoid disruption of sensitive electronics.
(IOW: I get really annoyed when slashdotters say "all you need is 'X'", without the slightest clue as to what the real requirements or complexities are.)
Re:Air is not water. (Score:5, Insightful)