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Beating the Heat in IT: Page 2 of 3

The resulting challenge affects lots of organizations, such as the Southern Ohio Medical Center (SOMC) in Portsmouth, Ohio. "We had to shoe-horn a data center into a small space, so the volume of air is small," explains Howard Stuart, the Center's radiology information systems manager, adding that his data center is only 30 square feet.

The exec told Byte and Switch that he opted for American Power Conversion's InfraStruXure system, which encloses data center racks to more effectively separate hot and cold air. (See Medical Center Deploys APC.) "For us, it was cheaper than building another data center."

The challenges posed by cooling are the same the world over. Sanzio Bassini, director of the systems and technology department at Italian supercomputing site Cineca, admits that cooling, and the energy needed for it, represent a major challenge. (See Cineca Picks Acronis .) "Our datacenter uses, at this point, something like two and a half megawatts of power," he says.

With 1,300 IBM BladeCenter devices packed into his data center, heat production is certainly on Bassini's radar, even if he is unmoved by some of the recent advances in cooling technology from the likes of IBM, HP, and Egenera. (See Blades Still Too Hot.) "We didn't decide on water cooling systems," he says. "[And] we didnt adopt exotic technology based on closed rooms and closed tunnels to keep hotspots in a certain manner."

Instead, Cineca uses what Bassini describes as "a general cooling system," with air coming up from below a raised floor to cool his servers and storage. "The reason is that it's more flexible," he says, explaining that his high performance computing systems only have a three-and-a-half-year lifespan, something that would make purpose-built water or airflow cooling systems an expensive option. (See IBM Unveils Cool Blue, Go With the Flow, and Data Center Heat Wave.)