An interview with CAREL’s Vice President Luigi Nalini. This is Part 1 of a three-part series.
An interview with CAREL’s Vice President Luigi Nalini. Supplied by CAREL
On 31 May CAREL participated at DCN in Milan, an event offering the opportunity to meet the main operators in the sector and discuss technologies, innovation, and energy saving.
It was also an opportunity to recall how the data centre industry represented the start of CAREL’s history, and how this could be a good time to look back over some stages in the technological evolutions in this sector, exploiting the unique experience in this field of our Vice President Luigi Nalini, in an informal interview spanning a wide range of topics, including some technical details and interesting facts.
Enrico Boscaro (EB): Good day Mr. Nalini. Nowadays the general public are quite familiar with computers and data centres, but what was it like back then to work in such an innovative context and have to try and understand what the needs were?
Luigi Nalini (LN): Good day to you. Perhaps I should start with some historical background: 50 years ago, in 1971, when I began to take an interest in these systems, computers had already been around for some time, but mainly for scientific use; in commercial applications, they were starting to be used by banks or other users that needed to process large amounts of data.
The first computing centres were vastly different from those we find today. There were no desktops and peripherals such as monitors or keyboards, rather the input-output interfaces were standard-sized cards that data and instructions were punched onto, based on precisely-coded logic.
These cards were in fact the ROM, RAM, and mass storage media.
Computer output consisted mostly of other punch cards or paper printouts, and only later were these replaced by magnetic storage media.
The punch cards were prepared using a punch card machine and arranged in sequence inside trays before being inserted into special optical readers connected to the mainframe.
The punching operations were often handled by specialist personnel, usually female, in crowded, noisy and uncomfortable places.
EB: That’s fascinating, and indeed gives an idea of a highly “mechanical” environment, a sort of data factory, totally different from today’s high-tech electronic data rooms with limited access to people, today’s data centres feature a high level of automation, with robots used to replace some components.
Air conditioning is currently one of the main energy expense items for data centres, and therefore it is at the top of the list of priorities and technical discussions, but is also part of their communication strategy, to ensure a “green” image and achieve sustainability objectives. Undoubtedly there have been technological evolutions over time that have changed the scenario, and air conditioning solutions have also needed to adapt: how has data centre air conditioning evolved over time?
LN: Back in the days of punch cards, computers comprised electronic circuits with arrays of transistors, and had low processing speeds and relatively low energy consumption.
The cards were cooled by fans inside the computer itself, which drew in air from the room.
The computer rooms themselves were mostly cooled using traditional systems, in other words, centralised air handling units.
The punch card preparation rooms were separate and often in different locations, and were also air conditioned using traditional systems or, at times, not air conditioned at all.
Source: CAREL website
