Data Center Visits

In the past few months, I got a chance to visit a few data centers.  From small server rooms to large co-location sites, these were great opportunities to get first hand experience at these operational data centers.  There are sites which are very organized and structured, and there are sites which are very ill-planned to the point they are basically a patch work of racks put randomly in a room.  Yet, they are both facing similar cooling challenge, where high heat-load server blades are simply too much for these data centers.  In a few years, server racks went from 1-5 kW, to 10kW or even 20+kW racks.  These data centers are simply not designed with these type of heat density growth in mind.

With our company venturing into the cooling optimization products and services, it is invaluable to get on the ground experience, see all sorts of different data centers, and the challenges face by these operators. In the past 2 weeks, I was able to visit the server rooms of 2 organization.  One of them is in the process of revamping the server room to accommodate the high heat-load server blades which are already in place, and more are coming in.  Another organization is also in the process of procuring new servers, and wanted to do a proof-of-concept solution first.  Proposes were put forth, and I have not receive any feedback yet.  It is time to follow up next week and perhaps, fingers cross, just may be, I will get my first sale.  Either way, it is a learning process, I hope to get some insightful feedback and see how we can better position ourselves to serve the impending need for cooling optimization.