One thing that I didn't see people mention.. The actual amount of energy you need to spend to remove that heat will very dramatically (drastically even) depending upon your cooling arrangement. If you are just dumping cool air into the roomt and mixing it in with the warm and and have no separation between cooling and the hot air, you will probably need to spend up to about $2 to cool for every $1 in server power (worst case).
On the other hand, if you have clear separation, you may be able get this below $1 depending upon how you are doing your cooling. You might want to talk to Chatsworth. They have a very efficient rack design with a chimney that will allow you to cool very efficiently, and with minimal cost. Whether this will work depends a lot upon how much room you have in your space to engineer the solution properly. You would want a false ceiling of appropriate size of the amount of airflow you need to maintain, which is dependent upon your servers and how you are loading the CPUs. (heavily CPU intensive jobs, particularly floating point, generate the most heat). How many disks also makes a significant impact. In the end, heating/cooling engineers can size your ducts appropriately based upon the air flow and differential temperature. This number varies widely between normal 1U rack mount and 2U and also blade servers, also vendor. The chatsworth chimney rack can do 8KW without much problem, and higher with the proper cooling infrastructure. There are many other ways to do it, all with different efficiency and impact. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
