Who cares about energy efficient data centres?
Who cares about cost savings due to running energy efficient data centres?
There are a lot of articles and blogs produced that talk about “energy efficient” Data Centres and the cost savings it produces. Unless the cost savings are being passed to you as the customer the fact that the operator is saving money means nothing to you…right?
Hyperscale vs Colocation
A significant contributor to the “energy efficiency” trend in white papers has been driven by an increase in hyperscale data centres that generally provide services to large entities with extremely high power densities in their cabinets. This type of operator can leverage the fact that they have large numbers of identical cabinets and a single customer occupying their entire space. This situation allows them to install very specific solutions for their cooling, power distribution, and fire suppression.
Colocation data centres are very different environments. There is a mix of equipment and customers within the same data hall space with very different requirements and power densities from cabinet to cabinet. This is where energy efficiency and your data centre providers understanding of it; is important to you. Running an efficient data centre requires constant monitoring and control of the data centre environment. Understanding customer requirements and the capabilities of the plant and infrastructure allows the colocation provider to maximise efficiency while maintaining a secure and reliable environment for customers.
Airflow and thermal shock, the commonly forgotten considerations.
In many articles discussing “Data Centre Efficiency”, the focus is often on changes to ASHRAE and innovations to cooling infrastructure with the hype around direct or indirect free air cooling. It can be easy to get caught up in the detail and technical information and lose focus on the primary goals for data centres – to ensure the equipment and the data it contains are secure, reliably powered, and efficiently cooled to manufacturers operating specification.
Often temperature and humidity are the only parameters discussed around the cooling of equipment, with airflow and thermal shock rarely considered. If too little air is delivered to equipment the fans need to work harder to draw the air in and the same applies if you provide the air too quickly past the inlet. Thermal shock is when internal damage is caused by constant variation in temperature. So while temperature and humidity are important to efficiently, they are not the only considerations to optimal operation.
At optimal operating parameters, the customer should experience less component failure, increase to the asset life and greater time between hardware refresh, meaning the potential for lower capital and operating expenditure.
As an enterprise class data centre provider, iseek has designed the cooling system and building management system (BMS) to ensure efficiency in delivering critical cooling to customer equipment. Our BMS has been fine-tuned to ensure the data halls are supplied with a consistent supply air temperature to avoid thermal shock and monitors the under floor differential pressures to ensure adequate air flow to customer cabinets.
