Small cabinet University question: Data Center heat dissipation and Basic Environment Construction

The deployment of high-density servers is inevitable for the development of data centers. The resulting heat dissipation problems should be highly valued. A small cabinet contains a huge xuanjicang.

The new generation of data centers is a hot topic in the industry, whether it is resource integration, virtualization, green energy saving, automation, and security management.

With the construction of a new generation of data centers and the further concentration of network, server, storage and other basic equipment, this puts forward new requirements for the basic environment of the data center. Taking the blade server application as an example, it features high computing density, easy deployment, good management, green and energy saving, and is a top choice for data center construction. However, the existing data centers have insufficient power and cooling capacity, which all plague the promotion and application of blade servers.

Insufficient power supply

We have previously introduced that the existing data center rack or cabinet has a power configuration of 10 AMPS) and can be deployed at full load for 15 ~ 16 1U rack servers. For data centers with lower power consumption, only 6.8A is available, for blade servers. A fully-equipped blade server requires about 10A of power.

Based on the existing capabilities of the data center, the 10A Power Supply obviously cannot meet the deployment needs of more than one blade servers, and the contradiction between power shortage is very prominent. How to solve the problem of insufficient power supply is most likely to start with resizing. In fact, when the data center or building is built, the power capacity is measured. Now, to increase the power capacity, the power department needs to expand and transform the corresponding lines, switches, and other equipment. There are many factors involved and there are many constraints.

Reasonable adjustment of existing power usage is another solution to power shortage. According to Pan jiachi, general manager of HP's global IT technology service department, by using a set of solution tools called "Adaptive Data High Availability Management Adaptive Data Availability Management, ADAM, they monitored data centers of some existing enterprises and found that about 10% of the power consumption was used for lighting, and only about 30% of the power consumption for IT equipment was used, the other large amounts of electricity are consumed in cooling, that is, the cost of operation management has greatly exceeded the actual cost of equipment use. Reasonable layout and scientific thermal model design can greatly reduce the power consumption of operation and maintenance equipment and effectively alleviate the contradiction between power shortage.

Start with Cabinet

The high cooling cost of air conditioners is related to the design of racks/cabinets and heat dissipation models. It is understood that the Air Conditioning Temperature in many data centers is very low. In summer, people need to wear thick clothes in the data center. The reason is that the data center sets the air-conditioning temperature according to the equipment with the highest heat dissipation requirements. This extensive management will inevitably lead to a reduction in energy efficiency.

The effect of data center heat dissipation is closely related to Cabinet selection and Cabinet placement. The cabinets are easily ignored. In an interview, the administrator of a power equipment room said that the company's IT budget is limited and IT is difficult to persuade the company's leaders to pay more than 10 thousand yuan to buy cabinets. In the eyes of some leaders, there is no big difference between the cabinets in the data room and the furniture in the home life. Many cabinets use glass doors in order to pursue a beautiful style, which leads to poor heat dissipation and frequent faults.

Currently, liquid cooling or water-cooled cabinets are the most discussed topics. A more accurate description is the cabinets using liquid cooling doors. This liquid cooling door can provide better heat dissipation capabilities. According to Wang jianchun, product and Technical Manager of panda, general air-cooled devices can support kW) of heat dissipation requirements. Liquid Cooling doors can be increased to kW ~ 35kw. In addition, compared with the air-cooled method, the liquid-cooled heat exchange method is easier to control, which reduces the interference of the hot air flow and improves the efficiency.

Wang jianchun said that, taking the NetAccess cabinet of panda as an example, its Water-cooled Door System adopts a separate Circulating System and cold Water Chill as the refrigerant, and a distributed compression host CDU (Cooling Distribution Unit) generally, a refrigerating capacity of kW to kw can be provided (up to kw can be provided for some products). That is, a CDU can control a maximum of six water-cooled Door cabinets, CDU and each cabinet have two pipe connections. CDU construction is not complex. It is only necessary to install a leak-proof device in the bending area, which requires a certain distance from the strong power cord. This water-cooled Door System provides a very effective solution for local high-density server cooling problems.

Concerns about Liquid Cooling

Meng Wei, enterprise computing manager of Johnson & Johnson in China, said they would not adopt similar systems. Johnson & Johnson has recently completed the construction of a big data center project ~ Three data centers provide comprehensive IT services for Johnson & Johnson production plants and sales branches in 14 countries and regions in Asia Pacific, including ERP services. Through this centralized data center integration, Johnson & Johnson has changed the way IT is deployed in a distributed manner in the past, and the level of enterprise management has been further improved. According to Meng Wei, during the construction of the data center, they used the anteng server and the blade server. Among them, the blade server has excellent performance in Application Integration, green energy saving, and other aspects. Based on the application results, the heat dissipation capability of the blade server can meet the requirements. They are very worried about Water Leakage When Using Liquid Cooling doors for heat dissipation.

Zhang song and Meng Wei, marketing manager of CICC Data System Co., Ltd. share the same view. At present, CICC data has built large-scale data centers in four core nodes: Beijing, Shanghai, South China, and Yantai, and has built remote backup centers in the western region. Relying on these data centers, CICC data provides third-party outsourcing data center services for financial and other large domestic enterprises and is widely known in the domestic financial industry. Zhang Song said that the construction of its data center is completely anhydrous. Even if the water-cooled air conditioning system is used, part of its water circulation is completely isolated from the data center. This aims to ensure the absolute security of the IDC environment.

Professional data center service providers also hold a wait-and-see attitude towards the water-cooled Door System. Bo yingxue, a Beijing chuangying technology company, said that they would not recommend Water-cooled Door systems when recommending solutions to users. For most users in the north, water-cooled systems are not required; second, many users gradually accept water-cooled doors for security considerations. From the perspective of chuangying technology, they will follow the water-cooled Door System Technology and track its development. Bo yingxue said that new technologies are always expensive in the early stages of promotion. Therefore, the current choice of air-cooling systems is the best cost-effective.

Wang jianchun said that this concern is caused by a lack of user knowledge about the water-cooled Door System. Taking Water as an example, it has undergone a special treatment, which is insulated and not conductive. In addition, various monitoring systems can monitor and manage the system at any time to prevent and trigger alarms. Wang jianchun said that at present, most data centers use air-conditioning systems to push air-conditioning. In order to reduce the temperature in some hot areas, the temperature usually needs to be adjusted very low, resulting in the average PUEPower Usage quota tiveness of data centers, energy Utilization Efficiency) over 2.5, and around 1.7 in foreign countries. In comparison, the energy consumption of domestic data center environmental facilities has greatly exceeded that of IT equipment. Data shows that by using a cold-Water Chill Water circulating cooling system, at least 20% of the energy efficiency can be improved.

Countermeasures for Air Cooling

In order to control the heat dissipation in some hot areas, in addition to the liquid cooling door system, adding air conditioners is also a common method to pressurize cold air in some areas. Traditional professional cabinet market manufacturers, such as Koshida, totem, and weilong, all have corresponding products and solutions. In the interview, Liu Xiaomin, Koshida's product manager, said that the liquid cooling door system is a high-end application requirement and is suitable for applications in an environment where the blade server is fully equipped, this situation often occurs in data center equipment rooms such as telecom operators, but for most users, there is no such application requirement. Here, Liu Qingmin also mentioned the cost problem. Due to the scale limitation, the price of the Liquid Cooling door system is still relatively high. Compared with the air-cooling system solution, the price is at least one order of magnitude, which is a relatively large investment for users.

By adding local air conditioners and reasonably placing cabinets, such as door-to-door and Back-to-Back cabinets, the hot and cold air tunnels can also achieve good heat dissipation. In this regard, Wang jianchun pointed out that local air conditioners also have certain limitations. First, the air-conditioning system needs to occupy the necessary physical space. It needs to add an additional air-conditioner in a row, face-to-Face cooling of some hot areas. In addition, this method can increase the cooling capability by about 15 kW. Beyond this range, air cooling will be powerless.

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