HP Chills Out

Like all the OEMs, HP recognizes that power and cooling are vital components of data center management. Some vendors focus cooling on at the data center level while others focus on the systems themselves. On Wednesday, at the Gartner 25th Annual Data Center conference in Las Vegas, HP announced an offering that bridges both sides.

Dynamic Smart Cooling and energy efficient servers are enabling HP customers to go green more easily.

HP is unveiled Dynamic Smart Cooling (DSC), a hardware and software solution it claims can deliver 20 to 45 percent savings in cooling energy cost as well as enable additional systems to be added without impacting net power costs.

DSC is a network of temperature sensors attached to equipment in the data center and connected to air conditioners via advanced control software that adjusts air conditioning settings by checking air temperatures in the racks and directing cool air to specific areas that need it.

Jeff Otchis, group manager for HP Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions marketing team, told ServerWatch that the solution “bridges the gap between IT and facilities,” by enabling the boxes themselves to determine the cooling.

The solution makes it possible for enterprises to treat power and cooling as a variable cost as opposed to a fixed one, Paul Perez, vice president, Storage, Networks and Infrastructure, Enterprise Servers and Storage, noted in a statement.

Because DSC is not tied to the hardware, it is not limited to HP server rooms, Otchis said.
It can be used with any standard IT equipment rack, and it incorporates standard interfaces to most air conditioning and building management systems.

DSC was in development with HP Labs for the past four years. It will be available worldwide in third-quarter 2007.

HP announced the offering near a full year in advance because data center deployments are often planned one year out, Otchis said. By announcing it now, HP is more likely to have customers on board when the solution is ready to launch.

Although pricing has not yet been established, Otchis said it will be set such that the return on investment will be reached within a 12-month period.

The first customer for DSC will be HP’s own IS organization, which plans to deploy the solution in its six consolidated data centers in United States.

In Search of Greener Servers

For those seeking energy efficiency from the source itself, HP’s energy-efficent endeavors extend to its server offerings.

Two weeks ago, the OEM gave nine servers from its ProLiant, BladeSystem, and Workstation families a speed bump to keep pace with the latest release from Intel.

The servers now contain the newly minted Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300 series processor.

All nine are available for immediate purchase.

HP also unveiled two new servers, both of which it claims were designed with energy efficiency in mind. The ProLiant DL365 is a 1U Opteron systems that delivers concentrated compute power, integrated Lights-Out management, and essential fault tolerance. It is designed for situations where space is at a premium.

In contrast, the ProLiant DL320s is enterprise-level, Intel-based serve. The 2U solution features Intel dual-core processors, 9 TB of storage capacity, and DDR2 Memory support. It offers 8 GB of PC2-5300 DDR2 memory, 9 TB of storage capacity, and the new dual-core Intel Xeon processors with 4 MB of Level 2 cache.