I second everything Mr. Doyle just expressed, especially his statement “Once we abandoned the status quo”. It seems that the status quo of datacenter designers is to simply apply the traditional methods of air and water based heat removal that they know and are comfortable with.

So in the interest of brevity, rather than pick apart the generalizations and assumptions expressed in this post, allow me to respectfully make a couple of observations. First, the message being delivered by the post seems confused. On one hand Mr. Egan makes arguments against densification, dubbed as “the fine print”. On the other hand, he makes a pitch for the benefits of UCS, itself a medium density platform. What is the post trying to say regarding adopting higher density platforms in the context of datacenters? The wide adoption of virtualization in general, and specifically the increasing density of blade/converged compute platforms such as UCS, Nutanix, Simplivity, and others, is undeniable. Should IT architects not take advantage of the efficiencies in denser compute, storage, and networking simply because the status quo of datacenter designers is apparently stuck in delivering low density, air-cooled datacenters?

Second, Mr. Sorrel takes the position “Densifying is not cost effective”, and then articulates the inherent limitations of CRAC based datacenter design in achieving higher per cabinet densities. On its face this is such a simplistic and self-reinforcing view, I can only presume that portion of the post was taken entirely out of context from some other writing and is just a victim of bad editing trying to keep the post really short.

In reality, there are many examples of datacenters, both new and retrofit, that have moved beyond the status quo and applied more progressive cooling and power delivery technologies that are far more efficient, achieve much higher densities, provide more flexibility, and cost much less to implement and to operate. Clearly, there are manifold economic and performance advantages to adopting higher density computing, networking, and storage. Until datacenter designers start taking into account ALL of the elements that make up the true capex and opex of a datacenter, not just power and cooling, status quo thinking will continue to deliver overpriced and underperforming datacenters that do not best serve the interests of organizations that are paying for them.