In the good old days of mainframes, much of cabinet design was based not on the real estate of the electronics involved, but rather on the electronics' cooling requirements based on typical data center design. Given a set of processing and storage requirements, IBM not only happily mapped out the mainframe and storage systems needed, but also specified the physical systems of many data centers. That often included chilled water runs for CPU cabinets.
That was then. Now, however, the modular design of modern compute and storage systems makes such a specification almost impossible. First, there's the heterogeneous nature of the data center environment, which prevents vendors from reasonably specifying room designs for equipment other than their own. Then there's the fact that these systems can be arbitrarily located in racks. Vendors specify clearances, but position within the rack is just as important as proximity to other equipment. Systems higher in the rack are prone to pulling the already heated air from systems beneath them.
As a result, localized cooling systems from third parties are often the best way to support higher system densities. In many cases, this simply means ingress and egress fans that force cooled air into and pull hot air out of the racks. In some environments, specialized rack-based cooling systems may make sense. Such cooling systems may require external refrigerant compressors or chilled water to operate, so while the systems themselves are fairly easy to assemble, there's likely to be some plumbing work required as well.
Using these systems alone, vendors claim to support up to 10kW per rack. APC offers one such solution that offers eight usable racks, supplying power and cooling for up to 10kW per rack. The entire system has a footprint the size of 18 racks and a cool list price of $400,000. New plumbing and electrical work will add to the cost.
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