At 02:11 PM 3/29/2008, Alex Pilosov wrote:
Can someone please, pretty please with sugar on top, explain the point behind high power density?
More equipment in your existing space means more revenue and more profit.
Raw real estate is cheap (basically, nearly free). Increasing power density per sqft will *not* decrease cost, beyond 100W/sqft, the real estate costs are a tiny portion of total cost. Moving enough air to cool 400 (or, in your case, 2000) watts per square foot is *hard*.
It depends on where you are located, but I understand what you are saying. However, the space is the cheap part. Installing the electrical power, switchgear, ATS gear, Gensets, UPS units, power distribution, cable/fiber distribution, connectivity to the datacenter, core and distribution routers/switches are all basically stepped incremental costs. If you can leverage the existing floor infrastructure then you maximize the return on your investment.
I've started to recently price things as "cost per square amp". (That is, 1A power, conditioned, delivered to the customer rack and cooled). Space is really irrelevant - to me, as colo provider, whether I have 100A going into a single rack or 5 racks, is irrelevant. In fact, my *costs* (including real estate) are likely to be lower when the load is spread over 5 racks. Similarly, to a customer, all they care about is getting their gear online, and can care less whether it needs to be in 1 rack or in 5 racks.
I don't disagree with what you have written above, but if you can get 100A into all 5 racks (and cool it!), then you have five times the revenue with the same fixed infrastructure costs (with the exception of a bit more power, GenSet, UPS and cooling, but the rest of my costs stay the same.)
To rephrase vijay, "what is the problem being solved"?
For us in our datacenters, the problem being solved is getting as much return out of our investment as possible.
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