HP Offers Different Approach to Data Center Cooling

Hewlett-Packard is looking to bridge the gap between a company’s IT and facilities departments, while offering a new way to monitor and control heating and cooling costs in the data center.

The Palo Alto, Calif., OEM announced Nov. 29 that it will begin offering a new service where HP technicians will evaluate and offer recommendations to help cool a company’s data center and also offer software and hardware that will help monitor power and heat.

Unlike other solutions that have been offered to cool increasingly dense data centers, HP will examine the data center, install sensors to determine the hottest spots and the places where energy is escaping, and then install a monitoring system to keep track of temperature and power.

HP said that instead of a solution that focuses on IT, it is offering a way for facility managers to control and reconfigure data center cooling and power flow within the existing infrastructure.

“This has been the talk of both our big and small customers, that they are having trouble with their cooling capacity and that they have been running out of headroom,” said Steven Cumings, HP’s director of marketing for storage networks and infrastructure.

“There really is a conflict between IT, which wants as much computing power as possible, and the facilities guys, who have to try and get the most power into the data center,” Cumings said.

What HP is offering under its “Dynamic Smart Cooling” program is a way to address these two issues, according to Cumings.

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: HP Offers Different Approach to Data Center Cooling.