Overcapacity in CRAC units is easy to determine. If you need to put on a sweater, or perhaps a parka, to go into your data center, you have more room-based cooling than you need. With proper planning, the ambient temperature of the data center can be as high as 78 degrees, says HP's Paul Perez, VP for scalable data center infrastructure. Most data centers run at ambient temperatures well below 70 degrees. Perez says that for each degree of increased ambient temperature, figure at least a few percentage points in reduced energy consumption for cooling systems.
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While determining that you've got too much capacity is easy, doing something about it isn't. Most CRAC units are simple: Either they're on or they're off; there's no throttling them down. Less than 10% of CRAC units installed today contain variable-speed motors, but even with the right motors it's not trivial to determine the effect of changing the output of one CRAC unit. Until recently, various vendors had the instrumentation and software capabilities to map airflows and temperature gradients throughout a data center, both in 2-D and 3-D, but no one had the ability to determine the "zone of influence" of each CRAC unit. In late July, HP announced Thermal Zone Mapping, which uses software and instrumentation to measure existing conditions and predict the effects of moving or throttling back CRAC units.
Along with its thermal zone mapping, HP also announced what it calls Dynamic Smart Cooling. DSC was developed with Liebert and STULZ, the two companies that produce the vast majority of room- and building-based cooling units in North America. The partnership lets HP software control the performance of newer CRAC units from the two manufacturers. For data centers built in the last five years or so, CRAC units may only require the addition of a controller board to interface with the HP system, provided those systems are equipped with variable-speed motors. Older CRAC units must be replaced to participate. HP claims DSC will save up to 45% on cooling costs. To achieve those sorts of savings requires more than just deploying a control system. The placement of CRAC units and computer racks will likely have to be rethought as well.
Once you start imagining moving the furniture around, it's time to call in the pros. No IT staff has the time or expertise to lay out a data center for maximum efficiency. Even if you understand the concepts of laminar airflow (which is good) vs. turbulent airflow (bad), you won't have the tools and software to measure what's going on in your data center. And, of course, when it's time to actually rearrange the facility, you'll need enough plumbers, electricians, and IT pros to get the job done in whatever timeframe you have.
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