Researchers Speed Up the Chase for Cooler Data Centers

"It is a key cost and a rising one," says Marion Howard Healy, an analyst focusing on data-center cooling for the Broad Group. "The increase in unstructured data means that storage costs are going up. And servers are becoming much more powerful, so (they) require more cooling then they used to."

Five years ago, a typical server rack, which is the size of a household refrigerator, produced between 1 and 5 kilowatts of heat. Today, typical server racks generate around 18 kilowatts, about as much as two average households. The trend towards hotter hardware will only continue: Manufacturers are working on cabinets containing higher-power chips that will produce three times as much heat, or about 60 kilowatts.

That could limit the types of cooling technology that could be used.

"We are getting to the point where you cannot do the cooling from air alone," Joshi says. "We want to do liquid cooling. You could certainly do a 60-kilowatt rack with liquid cooling."

The two trends mean that future data centers need to drastically reduce the cost of cooling to prevent it from overwhelming facility budgets. Typically, the energy required to cool the data center consumes 30 to 50 percent of the cost of running such facilities. In total, 60 percent of the cost of a data center relates to energy, Broad Group's Healy says. And, with more nations considering some form of carbon tax, companies should expect that figure to move higher.