Sustainable IT | Ted Samson » ColdWatt powers energy-efficient servers

March 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

ColdWatt powers energy-efficient servers

TAGS: Power supplies

Techies tend to get a little giddy about a blazing, state-of-the art CPU or a sleek, powerful new server -- sort of how an auto enthusiast gets excited about a souped-up V8 engine or a sexy, sleek Italian roadster.

But for a power supply (or a fuel injector) to elicit that level of excitement, it has to be especially interesting. (They even look boring. Maybe a racing stripe would help.) And these days, anything that can significantly cut the costs of keeping your server room cool and humming is quite interesting indeed.

A company called ColdWatt, based in Austin, Texas (the pea floating in Guinness), has developed a digital power conversion technology for power supplies, its first offerings being the 650W Power Sub-System and the AC-DC 1U 1200W Power Supply.(Those names might also benefit from racing stripes.)

These babies can generate 45 percent less heat than traditional power supplies, according to the three-year-old company. The result: 30 percent less overall server-power consumption.

That's significant. A server that typically needs 200 watts of electricity actually eats up 511 watts: 96 fizzle through power conversion and 193 go toward cooling the machine, according to ColdWatt. Using its power supply, the company says you'd need just 25 watts for power conversion and 106 watts for A/C.

The potential cost savings: $50,000 a year for a data center running 400 servers.

ColdWatt's secret sauce, by the way, is its proprietary magnetics technology that increases energy storage and digital control to boost efficiency.

The power-saving possibilities have piqued the interests of potential customers like AMD. "Power delivery is obviously a critical factor in the data center and AMD is excited about the ColdWatt solution and the positive impact we expect it will have at the system level in combination with the ... Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture," said Randy Allen, corporate vice president of the server and workstation division at AMD.

AMD-rival Intel has also exhibited enthusiasm, having demonstrated their servers that use ColdWatt power supplies at the Intel Developer Forum in last September.

Open Source Systems has already started packing its hardware with ColdWatt power supplies. "Their solutions were easy to integrate into our systems and enable us to deliver significant operational expenditure savings to our demanding data center customers," said Jared Giles, vice president of product management at OSS.

The first-gen 650W -- which started shipping last summer -- features 1+1 redundancy with active load-share and hot-swap, as well as communication interfaces including PMBus and PSMII.

The 1200W includes N+1 redundancy with hot plug-in; built-in fault protection; and support for PSMII and PMBus.

For more information about ColdWatt, go here.

Posted by Ted Samson on March 5, 2007 12:21 PM

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