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Buzz Briefs: Now You See Me...; Jet Engines Cool Servers: Page 2 of 3

It's a serendipitous union of a serious research lab and a hobby shop: Engineers at Hewlett-Packard are building servers cooled by modified versions of the jet engines used to propel radio-controlled airplanes. HP adapted the blades of the engine's propeller to create a fan that produces pressure to push heated air past the heat sinks.

Heat is a critical issue in data centers, so the project is more than just a neat hardware hack. The modified fans are smaller than normal computer fans and also more energy-efficient, allowing the designers to pack more servers into the same amount of space. The new fans, which HP has dubbed the Active Cool Fan, are used in the company's BladeSystem c-Class racks and servers. We can assume they don't also fly. --Andrew Conry-Murray, [email protected]

FYI

Symantec's Norton Antivirus software mistakenly identified parts of a sermon-writing software program as spyware and deleted it, earning the wrath (and perhaps a few curses?) of UK. vicars.

Source: ZDNet UK, zdnet.co.uk