HPQ: HP Bridges Gap Between Facilities and IT to Solve Data Center Power and Cooling Challenges

HP today announced a new energy management system and key initiatives to bridge the gap between facilities and IT to help customers dramatically reduce data center operating costs.

Based on work from the past four years by HP Labs, the new energy management system, called HP Dynamic Smart Cooling, is designed to deliver 20 to 45 percent savings in cooling energy costs or allow additional equipment to be added to the data center while keeping net power costs constant.

The HP system uses advanced software residing in an intelligent control node to continuously adjust air conditioning settings based on real-time air-temperature measurements from a network of sensors deployed on IT racks. Dynamic Smart Cooling actively manages the environment to deliver cooling where it is needed most, enabling essential cost savings to end users.

Due to its positive impact on the bottom line and the environment, Dynamic Smart Cooling will be adopted by HP’s own IT organization for its six new consolidated data centers in three geographic zones in the United States. It also is an important addition to HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure offering, which is the foundation for building next-generation data centers.

“By bringing facilities and IT together, HP customers can now change energy from a fixed cost to a variable cost within the data center,” said Paul Perez, vice president, Storage, Networks and Infrastructure, Enterprise Servers and Storage, HP. “HP’s holistic approach breaks tradition to solve the conflict between energy efficiency and IT scalability. Customers can now treat data centers as systems to be as carefully managed as the hardware running within them.”

Centered on Dynamic Smart Cooling, HP is creating a new partner program through which the company will work with leading architecture, engineering, equipment, technology, utility, real estate and service companies to accelerate adoption of energy efficiency solutions for next-generation data centers. The Data Center Solution Builder program will be managed under Perez and will feature EYP Mission Critical Facilities as its premiere partner.

“DSC solves a big problem the IT industry has been struggling with for quite some time,” said Peter Gross, chief executive officer and chief technology officer, EYP Mission Critical Facilities, Inc. “DSC not only dramatically improves the energy performance of cooling systems in data centers but also delivers improvements in overall data center reliability. It is the first step toward the ultimate goal of this industry – fully integrated and optimized data centers that bridge the gap between facilities and IT domains.”

HP also has formed an internal Smart Data Center design team that leverages some of the best minds across the company focused on lowering total cost of ownership through flexible power and cooling management products and services. The effort is backed by an investment of more than $10 million per year and is based on a portfolio of 100s of existing patents.

Expanded portfolio of power and cooling solutions

Dynamic Smart Cooling integrates well with existing HP innovations in power and cooling such as HP Thermal Logic, a key component of the HP BladeSystem c-Class architecture. Together, the technologies deliver significant savings to customers while reducing a data center’s overall environmental footprint. Dynamic Smart Cooling also can be used with any standard IT equipment rack and incorporates standard interfaces to most air conditioning and building management systems, making it ideal for new construction and retrofit projects.

HP also announced a 3-Phase Power portfolio, enabling facilities deployments to match the rapid evolution of IT equipment governed by “Moore’s Law.” By allowing power distribution and protection to be deployed in a modular fashion, customers have the flexibility to use what they need when they need it – while taking advantage of generational improvements over time. This yields higher density deployments with investment protection against unpredictable growth.

Bringing an IT solutions approach to increasingly demanding data center power requirements, the HP 3-Phase Power portfolio includes a modular three-phase Uninterruptible Power System and 100KVA Power Distribution Rack. When used with HP standard racks, these two offerings allow customers to deploy redundant power grids to support cost-effective, site-level power distribution and remote site monitoring, resulting in significant data center space savings.

Environmental commitment at Gartner event

Dynamic Smart Cooling is one of the many energy efficiency initiatives at HP that help the company and its customers reduce overall environmental impact. In support of this announcement, made at the Gartner 25th Annual Data Center conference, HP is reinforcing its environmental commitment by making the event CarbonNeutral® – emissions of the global warming gas carbon dioxide (CO2) generated by the event have been anticipated and all related CO2 emissions will be offset by HP’s purchase of credits. These credits are an investment in climate-friendly technologies like solar and wind power generation.

Pricing and availability

HP Dynamic Smart Cooling and the HP 3-Phase Power portfolio is expected to be available worldwide in the third calendar quarter of 2007. Pricing for the solutions will be released upon availability.

More information on the announcements above is available in an online press kit at www.hp.com/go/nextgenpowerandcooling. More information on HP Power and Cooling technologies and the Data Center Solution Builder program is available at www.hp.com/go/powerandcooling and www.hp.com/go/dcsb, respectively.