The great cooling debate and how Alcatel-Lucent changed the game.

I am scheduled to visit the Alcatel-Lucent facility in Plano . Texas next week to take a first hand look at their new modular server rack cooling system. Your first question is probably "Alacatel-Lucent makes a cooling system?!?" This longtime staple of the IT world and particularily the telecom industry decided to design and build their own cooling sytem. The primary reason behind this was frustration with the current state of computer room cooling. Alcatel has made a big investment in IP video since their primary customers the AT&Ts and Verizons of the world have made that their next big play. IP video on a commercial scale requires the highest density computing environment you can imagine.....squared. In their Plano testing facilitythey were routinely seeing inlet temperatures exceeding 95 to 100 degrees with hot spots in the 120s. Needless to say, the hot aisles in places were positively solar. The traditional cooling guys solution was "more capacity". The problem was that Alcatel had been stacking on capacity for years and they had basically run out of room to put cooling equipment. Instead of building new facilities to deal with this problem, the guys that brought you push button phones, callerid and digital telephone systems, decided that they would take a shot a doing it a different way...and they did it and it is amazing.
The really interesting part is the obvious dissatisfaction of one of the CRAC industry's biggest customers with the status quo. The technology at the server switch level has changed dramatically in just a few years and the advent of technologies like virtualization and ip video has created densities the likes of which we have never seen in the data center environment. The juxtaposition of this is the way we reject the heat from those spaces, this hasn't changes much in many years. I can't tell you at the times I have stood in big data rooms where the AC was still cooling this big space that actually held 6 racks. Everytime I see this I always think "What a waste!". The shrinking server footprint is the other side of the cooling coin but it comes from the same basic source...we do cooling pretty much the same way that we have done it for years.