Cooling the cloud

The hottest technology for your data center is not the trim little rack of blade servers you just rolled in or the new virtual machine software you recently deployed. In fact, the latest technology for your data center may well be outside the building: your cooling systems.

Cooling technology is hot because energy prices are beginning to soar again, up significantly since the beginning of 2009. Indeed, the costs for cooling large data centers may be the biggest line item for maintaining IT infrastructure in the cloud or inside the enterprise.

That's why the announcement today from Core4 Systems Inc. of Napa, Calif. could be welcome news for data center owners. According to David Nurse, president and chief operating officer for the company, which is making its public debut, Core4 has dramatically changed the underlying cooling technology, delivering staggering savings, up to 72% in cooling costs.

Core4's beta customer, Sonic.net in Santa Rosa, Calif., confirms the savings are real. In fact, Sonic.net's CEO Dane Jasper is so impressed, he's posted data on the reduction in energy costs in his blog. As he says, "The savings are amazing."

How can Core4 achieve that kind of reduction in costs? Nurse claims it's possible by dramatically redesigning the cooling hardware. For example, he says, his engineers redesigned the compressor component of the system by increasing the size of the coil and altering the pressure at the high and low end of the process to vastly improve efficiency.

Although data center cooling systems are not cheap, Jamien McCullum, Core4's vice president of business development, contends companies will get a full ROI in about a year and a half. Plus, he says, its technology can replace existing chillers piece by piece so your data center never has to go offline for the retrofit.

Sounds like a hot deal to me. And that's cool.