When most people think of a data center, certain things come to mind, one being the high energy costs to power it. Certainly one does not think of a cooling not required data center. However, members of the Always on Stanford Summit were asked this very question and whether they thought the future of the data center might no longer require cooling equipment. Their answer will surprise you.

Their answer shockingly, was a resounding “Yes”. IBM, Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems are already hard at work conducting research and testing in this area and have already come out with certain components that do in fact require no cooling! In the data center, Sun Microsystems is leading the charge with their concept of a self contained and self sustained data center dubbed “Project Blackbox”. Last October Sun unveiled “Project Blackbox”,   which requires no outside cooling and combines enterprise computing, storage, networking, hardware and software all built into one mobile container. The unit, outfitted with built-in liquid cooling is remarkably energy efficient. Liquid cooling you gasp? That’s right liquid cooling in the data center. Each data center is a modular based 20 by 8 by 8 container, that at first glance looks to be a shipping container.  Being mostly self sufficient, all that is needed is a concrete floor, a chilled water source, power and you now have a mobile data center that can be put into service just about anywhere in the globe!

Each Blackbox container houses up to 250 Sun Fire blade servers and provides up to 1.5 petabytes of disk storage. Now, that’s a lot of disk space! A blade server can be characterized as a server that has had certain component removed to allow for space constraints. Blade Servers are highly efficient and continue to be the coolest running servers in today’s IT market space.

Although the technology is not completely evolved yet, it is clear that the concept of a data center that does not require cooling equipment is coming. As component manufacturers such as IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems  are continuing to develop hardware componenents that  require no outside cooling and can withstand temperatures over 100 degrees fahrenheit. In turn, what we will see is the cooling requirements for the Data Center drop and the Data Center's energy efficiency rise. And what a savings in power consumption that will be!

Keep energy efficient!