What better time of the year to talk about the refreshing topic of cooling? More specifically, the efficient and money-saving cooling of data centers. As Tech Republic repoprts, IBM researchers have come up with a water-cooled supercomputer that consumes 40 percent less energy than a similar air-cooled model. Even better, the system can take the waste heat generated and funnel it into the building to help with heating. "When you combine these two developments, the result is a carbon footprint that is reduced by up to 85 percent." The computer, located at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is comprised of IBM BladeCenter Servers and goes by the name of Aquasar. There are no mainstream commercial products emerging from the research yet, but chances are there will be. Why? All discussion of carbon emissions and tree hugging aside, this is about saving money. A 40 percent energy saving is not to be taken lightly when you're looking at your data center's bottom line. As IBM's press release puts it:

Building energy efficient computing systems and data centers is a staggering undertaking. In fact, up to 50 percent of an average air-cooled data center's energy consumption and carbon footprint today is not caused by computing but by powering the necessary cooling systems to keep the processors from overheating -a situation that is far from optimal when looking at energy efficiency from a holistic perspective.

True enough. One way to become an IT hero is to find ways to save money on basic infrastructural costs like these. You can learn more about IBM's latest thinking in water-cooled components at the very interesting IBM Research site. -- Don Willmott   --Don Willmott