I had the pleasure of chatting with a group of Dell and Intel employees on Dell’s leadership move to support “chiller-less” data centers with Fresh Air Cooling. The people I spoke to were.

· Rich Percaccio – Enterprise Marketing Manager, Dell Global Commercial Channel

· Eric Wilcox – Power and Cooling Portfolio Manager, Dell Product Marketing

· Dave Moss – Engineering Strategist, Dell Data Center Cooling Infrastructure

· Jay Kyathsandra – Marketing Manager, Intel Datacenter and Connected Systems Group

After listening a bit to the discussion what came to mind is the problem of storage or network gear that can support these conditions.

To meet the needs of a broader range of companies interested in employing more efficient and economical facility designs, Dell has validated a portfolio of servers, storage, networking, and power infrastructure that deliver short-term, excursion-based operation with limited impact on performance across a larger environmental window. In line with the new, more stringent ASHRAE A3 and A4 classifications, Dell systems have been developed for sustained operation at temperature ranges from minus 23 F (5 C) to 113 F (45 C) and allowable humidity from 5 percent to 90 percent. This level of design robustness has been validated by recent tests indicating that the products can tolerate up to 900 hours of 104 F (40 C) operation per year and up to 90 hours at 113 F (45 C)

So I asked what % of Dell’s product line can currently run at 113 F? The answer 70%. Which is a good number, and we can expect that within 6 months it will rise another 5 – 10%. But, what about the rest of the industry?

What I admire Dell for is they took a risk to be in a leadership position. And, now the rest of the IT hardware vendors are in a defensive position.

What is also brilliant is Dell can change the TCO conversation as Fresh Air Technology can save a company money.

This can result in more than $100K of operational savings per megawatt (MW) of IT and eliminate capital expenditures of approximately $3M per MW of IT[2]. In addition, IT systems that can tolerate higher temperatures can reduce the risk of IT failures during facility cooling outages