Q&A: The man who helped raise server operating temperatures

of water cooling in 1995. In 2005, we announced the Cool Blue Rear Door Heat eXchanger that was applied to our high-end x86-type market because some of our products had very high heat loads that it created hot spots in data centers. This rear door heat exchange, which had cold water running through it, took out a major part of the heat load of the rack before it caused any problems for any other servers in the data center. Since that time, we now offer that across all our x86 products, our high-end P Series products, our Unix-based products, and also have it on every sale we make on our Power 6, 575 high-performance computing product that's shipped out the door.

How ubiquitous will water cooling be? We've gotten into pretty big time now especially with the Power 6, 575 bringing water down to the processor level. I think there will be more and more of push into this area. Education will be needed. Clients that live during the bipolar days [cooling technology prior to 1995] have no problem with this. It is two sets of clients in the market.

Is data center location being driven by free air cooling? Can we expect to see a lot of data centers in colder climates? Free air cooling is a big topic (PDF document). Customers are out there locating data centers in climates that can use outside, I'll say, air conditioning. A concern are contaminates that you may bring in from the outside. Temperature fluctuations, humidity fluctuations: All those have to be monitored so you are in the requirements of what the IT equipment manufacturer says is acceptable.