Quoting TechTarget

At the Data Center Power and Cooling Challenge seminar held at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit 2007 this week, an attendee poll of the 100 or so attendees uncovered that the greatest facility problems with data centers are insufficient cooling (37%) and insufficient power (43%).

Of those polled at the session, 93% said they will expand/upgrade, relocate or renovate their facility to accommodate power and cooling needs over the next year.

"Power and cooling is a pandemic in the world of the data center," said Michael Bell, research vice president at Gartner Inc., who headed the seminar. "By next year, about half the world's data centers will be functionally obsolete due to insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high-density equipment."

Technologies are coming into play to curb this dismal Gartner prediction, for example, in-server, in-rack and in-row cooling. By 2011, in-rack and in-row cooling will emerge as the predominant cooling strategy for high-density equipment, and in-server cooling technologies, like the one provided by SprayCool Inc., will be adopted in 15% of the leading server products, Gartner predicts.

To no surprise, servers built for density, particularly blades, are exacerbating the problem. Stacking these servers into a small footprint requires more watts per rack.

"When servers where all just pizza boxes that were moved around, it wasn't as big of an issue. Now we have blades -- or flame throwers -- and power and cooling is a problem," said Kenneth Uhlman, director of data center business development at Eaton Corp. during his session.

Gartner predicts blade installations will reach 7,200,000 by 2011. Looking at this from an economic standpoint, today, if you have two servers in a rack, the cost of running that rack per square foot is $112.13. If you put six servers in that same rack, the total cost per square foot is $420.48, and squeezing 12 blade servers in that rack will cost $1,261.44 per square foot, Gartner estimated.

Read the entire article, here.