"When you have 10-20 blade servers in one rack, that's a dense environment," said See, "and [that environment] often also includes storage. In our products, we use a cooling-fan design we call the "Intelligent Cooling System...it improves the efficiency of the cooling." See added that this system operates using "an LCD panel like a printer [that] shows the temperature of the infrastructure. It's a very different concept [for server-control] and easy to scale out."

The traditional cooling aid-raised-flooring-is not always the best approach, said Peter Hannaford, director of business development, availability enhancement group, EMEA, APC. He explained that it reduces space at the top of the room (a problem in Hong Kong where ceilings are often low) and can also be wrongly used to store cabling or other items which interfere with air flow.

Hannaford added that education was key to his firm's efforts: "A few PowerPoint slides showing CFD (computational fluid dynamics) help demonstrate the TCO of energy-savings. Our philosophy is to move the cooling units closer to the source of the heat: the servers. By doing so, we find the 'APC sweet spot': it's modular so it's scalable, and it doesn't rely on raised flooring."

Going virtual

"Storage systems continue to become more complex as the amount of stored data and storage equipment increases [but] there has been little increase in the number of storage administrators in Hong Kong," said Yau. "The management workload of administrators has increased [and] due to the relentless growth of user data, the networks that are used to store this data are becoming larger and more complicated. Server management has become a burden to system administrators, and there's an urgent need to simplify it.