5 Key Benefits of Power Density in the Data Center

With the incredible advances in data processing capacities across computing and storage platforms, the term "power density" has come to the forefront and is a critical variable in ensuring IT success with your data center deployment.

But what is power density?

Power density is the amount of power and cooling that a single data center cabinet is engineered to support. This is typically expressed in cooling capacities in terms of watts cooled per square foot, which then equate into supportable power loads per cabinet. Typical colos are designed to cool 150-200 watts per square foot, equating to only 3-5 kW of power draw per cabinet. This is considered a lower-density spec. Modern colos that are designed to cool 1000 watts+ per square foot can support 20 kW+ of load per cabinet, and this is considered a high-density spec.

Your modern servers are drawing a lot more power and require a lot more cooling per individual server than ever before. So the more power and cooling delivered per cabinet-the higher the power density-the more servers you can put in that single cabinet.

Why does power density matter?

The more servers you can deploy in a cabinet, the fewer cabinets you need; this optimizes your IT! Fewer cabinets leads to:

1. Reduced capex - less $$ spent on racks, cabling, in-cabinet PDUs and TOR switches
2. Reduced OpEx - lower monthly rack / cage, power circuit, and cross-connect fees
3. Optimized application performance - less latency with shorter cable runs
4. Stress-free scalability - you don't need to procure thousands of square feet for expansion
5. Enhanced operating efficiency - smaller footprint is easier to administer

This is the unfortunate outcome of lower-density data center deployments: lots of empty, unusable, difficult-to-manage, hard-to-scale and costly rackspace. If your on-prem or colocation rack footprint looks anything like this, we can help!

Come to Colovore, and look like this! For more information about Colovore's market-leading power densities, please email us at [email protected].

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