IBM and HP, old rivalries alive and well

Earlier this week I had the chance to catch an HP briefing on data center efficiency. It's a hot area with surprisingly little groundbreaking technology. But that doesn't stop old rivals from taking a good jab at each other. In late June, IBM made an announcement about an $86M revamp of its Boulder Colorado data center. The move will at 75,000 square feet to the facility and improve its overall energy efficiency.

HP's representatives scoffed at the effort, claiming that they'd already greened up six large data centers, and had been "doing this for years."

At the conference, HP announced new software for mapping data center heating and cooling thermal flows. To date, a number of sources have been able to provide both two dimensional and three dimensional thermal flow analysis, but HP claims that its latest incarnation is the only tool able to determine the "zone of influence" of computer room air conditioners. Knowing the zone of influence allows HP's professional services teams to do better "what if" planning for new systems and to design overlapping systems for critical systems.