Trends In Power & Cooling How Data Centers Are Tackling The Latest Challenges To Their Environments
Written By Christian Perry, Processor - Vol. 32 Issue 7
When even the most seemingly insignificant hardware changes in a data center can wreak chaos on power and cooling systems, it’s no surprise that IT personnel watch power and cooling trends with eagle eyes. Any opportunity to improve upon existing systems is a welcome one for data center managers. Here is a look at some power and cooling trends to keep an eye on.
Streaming Stress
As network bandwidth has increased over the years, so have video and application streaming, particularly in the mobile sector. For data centers, streaming smartphone applications and video downloads have increased the need for both bandwidth and storage as well as the corresponding need for supporting hardware, says Dave Ruede, vice president of marketing at Temperature@lert. This has created a need for more affordable infrastructure strategies when expansion of HVAC supplies to an existing data center isn’t practical.
“Potentially, this will lead to the need to monitor ambient conditions more closely—temperature in particular—especially where the ability to add heating and cooling capacity is on the edge of the HVAC system performance,” Ruede says. “In the final analysis, the decision to move to newer, larger data centers will be determined by the hardware supplier’s ability to put [additional] less power-hungry devices within the existing hardware footprint.”
As data centers grow, infrastructure expansion leads IT managers to deal with increasingly tighter spaces while trying to keep the company's systems running smoothly and its customers happy. According to Ruede, sensing of ambient conditions is helping these data centers avoid reaching conditions that threaten their systems, data, and the ability to serve their customers. USB, Wi-Fi, and even cellular temperature and notification systems are gaining traction as managers look to offset the potential impact from increased bandwidth and the hardware required to provide it.
Second Look At Green
Without question, the overriding trend when it comes to power and cooling is being green. Although data centers have been adopting green technologies for years now, the movement continues to gain steam as manufacturers and data center managers alike discover new methods for reducing power consumption. However, now that many data centers have experimented with green strategies, there’s an emerging trend to take a harder look at those strategies and determine if they’re truly worth the required effort and cost.
“A number of the recommended measures to make data centers more efficient can actually reduce system reliability and availability,” says John Jankowski, president and founder of JanCom Technologies, a technology infrastructure consulting firm. “Some advocate turning off redundant UPS modules in multimodule paralleled systems. However, this reduces the online redundancy for the situation in which one of the active modules fails. Likewise, flywheel UPS systems can reduce energy consumption because there is no battery space to cool. However, these provide ride-through times in seconds, rather than minutes, and therefore impose limitations on the configuration of backup generator systems.”
Further, retrofitting electrical and mechanical systems can be not only complicated but disruptive and expensive, Jankowski says, and the return on investments can be marginal. As an alternative to those potentially dicey options, data centers are starting to consider more energy-efficient server technology and better utilization of existing equipment through virtualization.
Keep Cool
Although it’s a concept still new to many managers and something that organizations won’t necessarily want to attempt to create on their own, fresh-air cooling will become more acceptable in the near future, says Michael Sigourney, senior product specialist at AVTECH. For example, he points to systems being built for the telecom industry that have proven to reduce power costs in cooling large racks from $1.50 to 5 cents per day.
“I’m sure that a 95% reduction in cooling costs will get attention from IT managers,” Sigourney says. “These leading-edge cooling systems will soon spread to data centers and other vertical applications.”
He also says that many companies have overspent on all-in-one, “super” cooling systems mounted on the roofs of their buildings. Instead, data centers will begin to look more toward portable cooling systems that can easily meet short-term and quickly changing needs for cooling small to midsized computer rooms or specific rack systems. For environments that need flexibility, such units can fill the bill thanks to their ability to be rolled into a room, mounted in a rack or from the ceiling, or even stacked.
Shed The Load
Data centers looking to squeeze the most out of existing resources continue to look toward virtualization as an efficient, affordable solution. Ironically, although virtualization can reduce power consumption by boosting efficiency and consolidating computing resources, it can create a need for more power from the same footprint due to the increased computing density, says Jim Smid, data center practice manager for Iron Bow Technologies.
“As this proliferates throughout an enterprise, existing data centers are faced with providing more power and cooling than was built into the original design,” Smid says. “Data center managers need to adopt emerging capabilities such as low-power components, load shedding, and intelligent monitoring to combat this explosive growth in an efficient manner.”
Load shedding is becoming more popular as a method for shutting down systems that aren’t in use or gracefully shutting down a system when predefined events occur, such as when backup power kicks on or when temperature or power consumption thresholds are reached. Smid notes that a good example is the integration of server vendors and virtualization software providers, where applications can be collapsed onto fewer physical servers during nonpeak hours and the extraneous physical servers can be powered on and off automatically to reduce consumption.
When even the most seemingly insignificant hardware changes in a data center can wreak chaos on power and cooling systems, it’s no surprise that IT personnel watch power and cooling trends with eagle eyes. Any opportunity to improve upon existing systems is a welcome one for data center managers. Here is a look at some power and cooling trends to keep an eye on.
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