Things get fluid- both servers and leadership- By Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (May 9 2011)

1. 

   Two things are top of my mind in Green IT this week. Green IT leaders are on the move, while liquid cooling is back on the agenda. Everything is fluid, if you like.

   Firstly, Jonathan Heiliger, the vice president who led Facebook’s Open Compute initiative (among other things) left the social media giant. Why would he do that?

   For the last four years, he’s been in the engine room, making sure that Facebook can serve a user base which grew from less than 100 million to over 700. In that time, Facebook has had some outages, but has had been a reliable service compared with some others.

   More than that, Facebook has pushed vendors to deliver “vanity free” servers, and then shared the details of the reduced-plastic, reduced energy machine and racks it uses, in the Open Compute regime, which we think is good.

   There is still lots more to do though, so why go now? There is still a lot to do in green data centers, and the work has just become more high profiole, so you might expect him to move to one of the other giants in need of an efficiency boost. We recently saw Microsoft’s Kevin Timmons leave for Apple, and other companies are hiring green leaders.

   But Heiliger is an entrepreneur. He’s not going to repeat his efforts on Facebook’s data centers elsewhere. The Open Compute project open sourced that, so - to exaggerate a little - now more or less let everyone can do that. He’s not taken another job, as far as we know, He’s going to stay involved with Open Compute.

   Meanwhile, Hardcore Computer showed off its liquid cooled servers in Europe, at the Datacentres 2011 event in Nice, France.

   Hardcore Computer has a server system which encases individual server blades inside aluminium cans, in which dielectric coolant can flow, and then puts those blades in special shelves.

   There are a few companies around doing liquid cooling direct to servers, which is massively better at taking heat away from chips than using air cooling. “Air goes everywhere but where you want it to,” said former Sun leader Scott McNeally in a recent interview with HPCwire - he’s enlisted as an adviser for Hardcore. “[Cooling a hot server] is like trying to blow a candle out from the other side of the room.”

   Here’s my thought. Moves like Open Compute are pushing forward the final commoditisation of air-cooled data centers. They are taking complexity out. Liquid cooling is a new frontier, where technology choices still make a difference.

   If you want interesting technology, liquid cooling is where the action is now.  

   -->

   Bookmark or Share this article

Login to comment.