Thomas Edison lost the war when it came to his advocacy of direct current as the best way to distribute electricity. But his ideas are now winning battles as a solution to growing power and cooling problems in the data center.
For electricity flowing all the way from power plants to the wall socket, alternating current rules the roost. For the short transmissions inside those computers, though, DC power prevails. The search for ways to convert AC to DC more efficiently is leading some data center companies to consider a DC-centric engineering approach.
The DC sales pitch, most notably from server market newcomer Rackable Systems, puts the once-ignored issue of electrical efficiency at center stage. However, while Sun Microsystems and IBM might agree with DC backers that computer power and cooling is a major problem, those server incumbents generally disagree that DC is part of the solution.
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News.com
Mar 2, 2006, 08:07 PM
