Cooling the server (blade)

  
                     Data center in the "Fever" business station
Standing at the door of the machine room, Lao Gao is reluctant to walk in. Look at the operation of the equipment, listen to the sound of the roar of the machine, this is his daily work, but the enthusiasm seems to be gradually fading, he can not accept the dilemma & mdash; the carefully created data center is suffering ; fever; rdquo; suffering. Although devices such as critical servers are far from the renewal deadline, the rapid growth of the company's business has brought increasing operational pressure to the data center. After the comprehensive trade-off, Lao Gao, who is responsible for the information center, decided to implement the data center upgrade in advance. The final choice of blade server system is significantly more efficient than previous server systems, and more important is to avoid the limited space in the machine room. However, this should have been proud of the performance but did not let the old high excited for a few days, the original air conditioning equipment can not effectively solve the problem of heat dissipation of the blade server & mdash; in a 100 square meter area of ​​the machine room, even can clearly feel the different areas The temperature difference; the air conditioning temperature is adjusted to a low level, but the blade cabinet is still hot. In fact, there are not a few users who are currently facing the same heat problem as Lao Gao. A survey of users in the current room cooling situation showed that 38% of the surveyed users were suffering from local hot issues. As blade servers become more widely used, data center deployment density is increasing: hot swapping and redundancy are applied to blade servers, and these designs address the server performance requirements of dense computing environments. From the outside, blade servers can maximize server space and cost compared to traditional rack/tower servers. The blade server enables a natural leap in cabinet optimization. However, while the blade server maximizes space for the data center, it also causes a sudden rise in the heat per unit area of ​​a single rack or rack, resulting in a high heat density phenomenon in the room. While many blade servers are designed with low-power processors, they are still one of the largest heat sources in the machine room. At the same time, energy conservation and consumption reduction have not only become an important indicator of the country's sustainable development strategy, but also an important part of the company's development strategy. Actively responding to the challenges of blade server heating and improving energy efficiency have not only become the first appeal of data center users for air-conditioning and refrigeration solutions, but also become a powerful lever for inciting data center transformation. The local overheating problem faced by the blade server facing the data center cannot be ignored. In this regard, domestic data center users have also provided some cooling solutions, such as the currently widely used method of hot and cold channel layout. However, with this method, as the heat generation of the equipment increases, the degree of local high heat density increases. Even if the design has reasonable hot and cold passages, it is still limited by objective conditions such as high building height and floor height. occur. Therefore, for the high heat density of blade servers, there is a need for targeted high-efficiency cooling solutions. Carefully select air conditioners to master energy efficiency & ldquo;speak right”
In a typical data center, IT equipment accounts for 30% of energy consumption, and air conditioning systems (including chillers, humidifiers, and computer room air conditioners) consume With 45% of the electricity, data center air conditioning energy consumption has almost “half of the right to speak” in building a green data center. If a company is “moving” its own business to an IT system without implementing good planning and management of power consumption, the faster the informationization, the faster the company may face an energy crisis. Today, the expensive IT system will become "golden handcuffs" tomorrow. Therefore, building a green data center is not just a simple slogan. In the economic downturn, it also has a survival for enterprises. A vital role, and air conditioning refrigeration is the key to solving this problem. Computer room air conditioning equipment should be designed with energy-saving components at the beginning. The energy consumption of air conditioning equipment in the computer room is mainly composed of five parts: compressor energy consumption, heater energy consumption, humidifier energy consumption, condensation fan energy consumption, and evaporation fan energy consumption. Among them, the compressor consumes the most energy, and the highly efficient and energy-saving scroll compressor saves about 30% energy compared with the conventional compressor, and has a longer service life and a lower failure rate. In addition, although the energy consumption of the fan is not high, the fan is the longest running time in the air conditioner. In the long run, the energy consumption of the fan's “contribution” is not smaller than that of the compressor. The high-tech variable air volume fan is used to ensure the lowest energy consumption of the fan under the premise of meeting the heat dissipation requirements. In addition to lowering the temperature of the data center by reasonably improving the operating temperature of the air conditioner, from a practical point of view, domestic users can consider improving the air temperature of the air conditioner by improving the airflow organization. The traditional airflow organization method is to cool the IT equipment through the cooling environment. The whole data center is similar to a cold storage, many of which have no IT equipment, and the cooling place is also cooled, which is equivalent to the extra cooling amount. It is not economical. Moreover, due to the uneven distribution of the heat load, local overcooling or overheating may occur, which affects the normal operation of the main equipment. In addition, due to the mixing of hot and cold airflow, some of the cold air is short-circuited, and the utilization rate of the air conditioning system is very low, even less than 50%, resulting in great waste of electrical energy. As far as the current situation is concerned, changing the control temperature of the data center is one of the most effective energy saving measures. Precision air conditioners in professional computer rooms can improve the cooling efficiency of the machine room, but still face a series of challenges in the promotion and application process. Because many domestic enterprises have only some perceptual knowledge about the construction of data center computer rooms, but the technical level is very limited. For example, these decision makers may put more energy into business operations and sales management, and the understanding of back-end data center support has faded a lot. They tend to consider the cooling problem of the data center from a non-professional point of view. The best way to solve the problem is to cool down. The easiest way to directly reduce the temperature is to lower the air conditioner temperature. In fact, achieving the ideal data center cooling effect is not only simple to reduce the temperature, which involves the air supply mode, hot and cold air channel control, rack structure design, and even the comprehensive management capabilities of the data center's overall management software. It will have an impact on the heat dissipation of the data center. Through a series of data and theory, the IT support engineers of the company or organization may be able to persuade, but the decision makers of those enterprises are more concerned about the initial input cost of IT equipment and infrastructure, because the data will be directly reflected in the company's On the financial revenue and expenditure statement. The initial input cost of adopting the precision cooling mode of the professional computer room is slightly higher than that of the traditional air conditioning refrigeration, and the energy consumption reduction and cost saving brought by the use of precise cooling to improve the cooling efficiency are long-term, and it is not easy to invest compared with the initial infrastructure. Get intuitive data in real time. Blade server cooling effect can not be discounted
Establishing a green data center is to reduce the energy consumption and management cost of the data center, improve the utilization of each device in the data center, and at the same time improve the efficiency. The return on investment, rational and deep understanding of the energy and cost content of green data centers is very important. Relevant information shows that the cost of power and cooling has become the second largest source of cost in the data center when IT budgets are compressed. At present, more and more enterprises are plagued by the huge energy consumption of data centers, increasingly severe heat dissipation problems, and high electricity bills. Reducing energy consumption and simplifying management have become the core issues of enterprise information system infrastructure. Blade servers have a higher density, and each cabinet requires more power than a traditional cabinet of the same size, so although a single blade server has a higher energy efficiency ratio, the overall power consumption is greater, resulting in Heat is also proportional to the increase in density. Especially when a large number of blade servers are running, the room will generate more heat per square meter, which requires the data center to provide sufficient cooling capacity. Some companies have taken some expedients, hoping to ease the burden on the data center for blade servers in terms of power and cooling. By leaving some blank floor next to the rack, let the cold air come in, and then open a back door to drain the heat inside the room. What's more, put some water in the data center to play the role of water cooling. ”. With these methods, the cost of power and cooling requirements may outweigh the benefits of using a blade server. Some companies may adopt a strategy of moving the data center to a larger computer room by redeploying the equipment room and then using more powerful house-level cooling to reduce the indoor temperature. The drawbacks of this are obvious. In addition to the high cost of “sportsmanship”, room-level cooling is not efficient, can not achieve accurate cooling, and wastes a lot of power, in fact, airflow problems, not air temperature problems.
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