FOCUS DATA CENTRE LEADERS AWARDS


Issue 8, Feb/Mar 10


ABOUT SCHMIDT


Roger Schmidt – Winner Data Centre Leaders Awards Outstanding Contribution to the Industry Roger Schmidt has spent his entire career at IBM designing power and cooling solutions that scale from processors to data centers. With over 100 patents to his name, he was made an IBM Fellow in 2009


R


oger Schmidt grew up on a farm. On farms, things need to be fixed all the time – and those things tend to be mechanical.


As a student, he found he had an aptitude for science and maths, and despite the fact that when he entered high school he had no clear idea where he would end up, after graduation he headed to Bradley University in Peroia, Illinois, which he describes as “a good fit”.


Schmidt chose to study mechanical and electrical engineering at Bradley University. He then completed his PhD in water cooling at the University of Minnesota. That was in 1977. His next move surprised even Schmidt.


In the mid-1970s, the US economy was strong and university graduates were getting lots of job interviews, says Schmidt.


Schmidt’s interest in heat transfer and thermal management was pushing him into considering various roles, none of which had anything to do with the IT industry.


He recalls he had a hectic interview schedule – more than 20 companies – and that he was just about ready to make up his mind when IBM asked him to come for an interview in New York.


“You don’t really think of IBM or any IT company as being heavily into mechanical and electrical engineering,” says Schmidt. But he made the trip, and when he got there was surprised to find a substantial group in engineering within the company, and that a major emphasis of what they were trying to achieve was a completely natural fit for his PhD working around cold plates, pumps, heat exchangers in power, packaging and cooling.


Although it was a big move, especially as a Midwesterner moving to the east coast, Schmidt and his wife (who met at university) both joined IBM in the same week – he in engineering, she in software.


THERMAL COOLING Over the next 10 years Schmidt was heavily involved in Thermal Conduction Modules


16 www.datacenterdynamics.com


(TCM) – see box. Schmidt says this got him even more interested in thermal cooling and that the work on TCM carried on into the 1990s, when IBM switched from bipolar to CMOS-based architectures.


Schmidt says that all his work was connected to power and cooling issues over the next 20 years. He formed the air cooled group and managed it for about five years, managed the water cooling group for another five years and, in 1993 – amid IBM’s famous downsizing period – held on to his job but moved back into a development role, which was a non-management position.


In 1997, he implemented the first refrigeration system – having got out of water cooling in 1995 – something he brought back in 2005 with a rear door heat exchanger, and also brought it back into processor cooling.


DATA CENTER MOVE It was in 1998 when Schmidt realised that new chip technologies and the ubiquity of servers would cause serious issues within the data center space. “Back in 1998, data center activities were merely a side project,” he says.


Moving from a bipolar system to a CMOS- based system meant it was open season for people rolling in racks. “The last bipolar rack was running at 80kW and the first CMOS rack was at 2kW.


“On a physical level, the shift meant moving from hundreds of square feet to a single rack, and while bipolar cooling mostly went to water, CMOS cooling was to air.”


But the shift in scale of a single rack meant the numbers were still low compared with what had gone before. Concerns were growing. Schmidt says that watching everyone rolling in racks, it suddenly became clear no one on the client side really understood the implications of what was coming.


The clients didn’t really understand it and the suppliers were selling so much kit it wasn’t a priority for them either.


By the late 1990s, Schmidt could see the


limits would be hit. By chance he was attending a conference and got to chatting about common problems with a man from a rival server company which specialised in heat loads.


“All the thermal guys knew there were problems, but our respective companies didn’t want to put an emphasis on it. So we decided that if we worked as a group, we could get people to listen to us.”


Ken Brill, Uptime Institute founder and winner of the 2008 Data Centre Leaders’ Lifetime Achievement award, published our power trend study in 1999. Then we moved the group over to ASHRAE, he says.


The TC9.9 group is now the biggest technical committee within ASHRAE, says Schmidt.


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