According to the Forrester report, Updated Q3 2011: Power and Cooling Heat Up the Data Center, energy costs make up 70% of the approximate operations costs of a data center facility. Perhaps more interestingly, the report states that the data center rack is becoming the bottleneck in forward progress due to increased density and reduced energy and greater space efficiency.

Data center racks aren’t the most socially shared topic around, but it is interesting that with all of our impressive technology, the rack itself may be hampering our progress in achieving improved density.

Standard rack cooling has limits due to airflow limitation in data centers, as confirmed in the Forrester Research. A standard rack is able to mount equipment that draws in excess of 25 KW per rack when populated with dense servers or blade technology. It is difficult in practice to cool a rack that dissipates more than 8 KW of power due to airflow limitations. This often leads to data centers becoming space-inefficient with wasted rack space in order to achieve adequate heat dissipation.

Imagine explaining to your boss why your data center racks are only one third full, but you still need to buy more in order to accommodate additional equipment. This would clearly qualify as a “difficult conversation.”

With these requirements in mind, Anue Systems designed its 5288 Net Tool Optimizer™ (NTO) as a high-density, energy-efficient and space-saving solution for network monitoring in data centers. The 5288 NTO provides 1G, 10G and 40G Ethernet support with a non-blocking architecture and 640 Gbps total bandwidth while consuming only 4 watts per port and a total space requirement of 2U. The 64 10G ports can be used for network port connections or monitoring tool connections in a 2U form factor with a total power consumption of 260 watts. That’s 4 watts per port.

The 5288 NTO, in a 40G network, can handle 16 40G ports for network connections or monitoring tool connections. In addition, network monitoring switches like the 5288 NTO are typically implemented in data center racks. With the 5288 NTO consuming 260 watts or less, depending on network configuration, it is contributing a small amount of heat to be dissipated in the rack.

So with an airflow-dictated budget of 8000 watts for a 16U rack, and the 5288 NTO only consuming a fraction of capacity in its 2U form factor, producing only 3.2% of the energy budget that can be dissipated in the rack according to the Forrester research on standard racks in data centers. A comparable network monitoring switch from a well-known competitor of Anue’s requires 895 watts to power 96 ports, and requires 14U in rack space.