Even those radical steps provided only temporary relief, because the room was so overloaded with equipment. Had ILM not moved, Bermender says, it would have been forced to move the data centre to a collocation facility. Managers of older data centres can expect to run into similar problems, he says.
That suits Marvin Wheeler just fine. The chief operations officer at Terremark Worldwide manages a 65,742-square-metre (600,000sq2) collocation facility designed to support 100 watts per square foot.
"There are two issues. One is power consumption, and the other is the ability to get all of that heat out. The coolling issues are the ones that generally become the limiting factor," he says.
With 610mm floors and six-metre-high ceilings, Wheeler has plenty of space to manage airflows. Terremark breaks floor space into zones, and airflows are increased or decreased as needed. The company's service-level agreements cover both power and environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity, and it is working to offer customers Web-based access to that information in real time.
Terremark's data centre consumes about six megawatts of power, but a good portion of that goes to support dual-corded servers. Thanks to redundant power designs, "we have tied up twice as much power capacity for every server", Wheeler says.
Terremark hosts some 200 customers, and the equipment is distributed based on load. "We spread out everything. We use power and load as the determining factors," he says.
But Wheeler is also feeling the heat. Customers are moving to three- and 3.62-metre-high racks, in some cases increasing the power density by a factor of three. Right now, Terremark charges based on [area], but he says collocation companies need a new model to keep up. "Pricing is going to be based more on power consumption than [area]," Wheeler says.
According to EYP's Gross, the average power consumption per server rack has doubled in the past three years. But there's no need to panic -- yet, Donabedian says.
"Everyone gets hung up on the dramatic increases in the power requirements for a particular server," he says. But they forget that the overall impact on the data centre is much more gradual, because most data centres only replace one-third of their equipment over a two- or three-year period.
Nonetheless, the long-term trend is towards even higher power densities, Gross says. He points out that 10 years ago, mainframes ran so hot that the systems moved to water cooling before a change from bipolar to more efficient CMOS technology bailed them out.
"Now we're going through another ascending growth curve in terms of power," he says. But this time, Gross adds, "there is nothing on the horizon that will drop that power".