Cisco & Sun Servers Spar for Best Humidity Support

One of the clear trends in data centers is to improve data center efficiency by making greater use of HVAC economizer modes. For air-side (dry-side or outside air) economizers, one of the keys to broad adoption is to be able to use outside air across as broad a relative humidity (RH) range as possible.

Among the major blade vendors, Cisco appeared to have taken the lead by offering support for the broadest operating humidity range, but Sun appears to have matched Cisco recently:

• Cisco's Unified Computing System blades support 5 to 93% RH
• Sun's Sun Fire X2270 blades support "up to" 93% RH
• HP's c-Class BL260 G5 blades support 10 to 85% RH
• IBM's BladeCenter HS22 blades support 8 to 80% RH
• Dell's PowerEdge M600 blades support 8 to 80% RH

(All humidity ranges are non-condensing. All data is from vendor web sites as of 9/3/09).

Ever-widening ranges for supported humidity make the use of dry-side economizers more feasible. If vendors were able to support 0-100% relative humidity, data center operators wouldn't need to worry about humidifcation/de-humidification controls. Eliminating such controls and systems could lower capital costs, reduce operating costs, lower the carbon footprint of facilities, and lower their water footprint as well.

--kb

Truckin' Down the Information Superhighway

Last week, I was talking with a friend from Sun who is involved with Sun's containerized data centers. He mentioned that since they helped the Internet Archive put 3.2 petabytes of storage in a shipping container, they figured they could put the container on a truck, take 7 days to ship the container across country, and still average >40 Gbps over that 7 day period!

Coincidentally, two days later Amazon introduced Amazon Web Services Import/Export with a blog that starts off with the following colorful quote attributed to Andy Tanenbaum:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

Amazon Web Services Import/Export allows people to send USB or eSATA hard drives/media to Amazon for data sets that are impractical to send over available communications links.

It turns out that the bulk version of sneakernet may be the most expeditious way to move data. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

--kb
Note: Revised title on 5/29/09.