Carnegie Mellon's Data Center Observatory

[BillP]

This is a great article about Carnegie Mellon's data center of the future. Here is an abstract...if you want to read more you have to register on energyandpowermanagement.com and activate a user account for yourself. It is worth the read! There are some great pics as well.

One of the PDL?s most ambitious research projects, the Data Center Observatory (DCO), breaks new ground in the field of data center operations research. The DCO is both a fully operational data center and a research facility devoted to developing strategies for reducing data center operational costs. ?The growth of data and the demand for ever more complex data analysis, poses some significant data center capacity and data center data backup challenges,? says Greg Ganger, Director of the Parallel Data Lab. ?The only way to define the data center efficiency problem is to live and breathe it. The team?s goal is to document data center challenges and to experiment with ways to better assemble and manage a data center. The team has begun to tabulate and monitor a variety of metrics including data center power consumption and heat generation data, and a record and categorization of the human administration time spent to build and run a fully functional data center.

http://www.energyandpowermanagement.com/CDA/Archives/BNP_GUID_9-5-2006_A_10000000000000024460

And here is a follow-up article about reseraches at Carnegie Mellon attacking the rising costs of data center operation:

http://www.energyandpowermanagement.com/CDA/Archives/025ee310a3c1c010VgnVCM100000f932a8c0____

Enjoy!