HPCwire: Rackable Eases Power Struggle in the Data Center

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September 08, 2006

Rackable Eases Power Struggle in the Data Center

by Michael Feldman, Editor, HPCwire

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Founded in 1999, Rackable Systems has been one of the fastest growing x86 server makers over the last four years. It now stands as the 4th largest x86 servers vendor in the U.S. (ahead of Sun Microsystems) and 8th globally. With just over $20 million in revenue in 2002, this year Rackable expects to reach over $300 million. Its customers, including Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft, represent some of the largest scale-out deployments of capacity cluster infrastructure in the industry.

The secret to its success? Rackable does some of the same things that a lot of other tier two x86 server vendors do. It offers industry-standard hardware from multiple vendors at competitive prices, allows for lots of customization, and is willing to go after both large and small accounts.

But Rackable provides a couple of features that differentiate its offerings from run-of-the-mill server vendors. The company has designed a half-depth form factor arranged in a "back-to-back" rack-mounted configuration, which results in much denser footprint than a standard server rack. The company also offers DC power options that it claims can provide an energy savings of 10 to 30 percent. Together, these features enable Rackable servers to inhabit some challenging data center environments.

The half-depth back-to-back rack mounting, besides creating a smaller footprint, produces a couple of other advantages. One is that all the I/O and network cabling ends up in the front of the cabinet, where it's easier to access and service. No more scrambling to the back of the cabinet to figure out which cables are connected to which servers. The front-side cabling also leaves space for an air plenum in the middle of the cabinet (at the back of each half-depth unit), which provides for efficient ventilation. Rackable had the foresight to patent the back-to-back rack design and, according to the company, has already invoked its protection against at least one would-be imitator.

The inconvenient side of compute density is the increased need for power and cooling. But Rackable offers a solution for that too. Instead of relying on individual power supplies in the servers to convert the AC power to DC power, the company claims it makes more sense to do the conversion outside of the machines and feed them directly with DC. Rackable's most popular way of doing this is by using a AC-to-DC rectifier for each cabinet. The rectifier sits on top of the rack and distributes DC power to all the servers beneath it. Each server contains a DC card instead of a whole power supply, removing a major source of heat from the machine.

Energy savings can add up quickly. For a cabinet-level AC-to-DC rectifier solution, the company claims that a 10 percent reduction in energy requirements is fairly conservative. If your data center houses a large server farm, cost savings could reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Also, by replacing all the power supplies with DC cards, reliability improves substantially. AC power supplies are notoriously unreliable -- thus the presence of redundant power supplies for mission-critical systems. The DC cards themselves have much higher MTBF ratings, while redundancy at the rectifier level can be used to cope with an AC power failure in the facility. And by removing the heat load of the AC power supply from the server box, the longevity of the other system components can be extended.

Rackable offers vanilla AC-powered servers as well, but interest in their DC solution has been growing. In the second quarter of 2006, the company reported that about half of all units sold used the DC-powered solution. And it's not just the large deployments; smaller installations like the University of Florida's High Performance Computing Center have selected DC-based Rackable systems for their cluster computing needs.

Cool Cluster for Florida

The HPC Initiative at the University of Florida is on an aggressive schedule to expand its computing resources every 12 to 18 months. In 2005 they were looking to double or triple the performance of their legacy Xeon cluster, but realized their cramped machine room was going to be a problem.

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