Bluestone Energy’s Director of Data Center Services Coy Stine recently wrote an article for infoTECH Spotlight titled “Cooling the cloud” about the challenges the architecture of the cloud brings to traditional cooling paradigms. From the article:
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce), cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
The key point here is that cloud computing still requires a set of computing resources. Despite being highly configurable, extensible and available through the shared infrastructure of the Internet, the fact remains that cloud computing infrastructure comprises, at core, electrical components that consume electricity and produce heat.
This cloud-computing hardware must be cooled by something, regardless of the hardware’s location or owner. In the end, the sophistication of the required cooling infrastructure depends on the computing resources’ power density and layout.
