Airflow key to data centre costs

Increasing power demand leading to problems for firms

At the London Datacenter Facilities & Engineering conference in London this week, firms were urged to make sure their current datacentre operations are under control before rolling out blade servers and virtualised applications.

Intel's senior consultant engineer worldwide, John Wallerich, said, "Many of my customers believe this [virtualisation] is a magic bullet, but for many it's not a feasible approach."

Far from simplifying and making datacentre operations more efficient, rolling out blade servers and virtualised applications could actually cause power problems if not planned and commissioned properly, said Wallerich.

Server giant HP is preparing a system that it thinks could crack the growing problem of datacentre power and cooling.

Increasing power demand in server rooms has led to big problems for firms faced with thermal issues and spiralling electricity bills, forcing them to look at ways to manage their computing capacity. HP’s answer is to fix two sensors on every rack and relay data on inflow and outflow temperatures via an intelligent node to air-conditioning systems in order to automate control and maximise efficiency.

The IT giant calls the initiative Dynamic Smart Cooling and is promising datacentre power savings of up to 45 percent. “We’re bridging the gap between what’s happening in IT and facilities management,” said Paul Miller, HP marketing vice-president. “There’s a different set of players from the IT companies to the air-conditioning and control systems people – the Lieberts of this world.”

To get around that, HP is working with these suppliers to link IT equipment to cooling and management systems. While much attention has been focused on power consumed by IT hardware, Miller said that over-compensation was part of the problem, with 60 percent or more of datacentre power typically consumed by efforts to cool. HP expects to launch the system in the third quarter of next year.

However, Intel's Wallerich fingered airflow management and capacity planning as two major areas where datacentres to get into difficulty. "Some datacentres are running out of electrical power just 18-24 months after being built," he said. "The real problem in datacentres is isolating the hot and cold air flows. I've seen half of the hot air produced by hardware being vented back in through what's supposed to be the cooling system. Simple and inexpensive airflow designs can more than double kilowatt per cabinet capacities."

CS Technology's IT consultant Bill Angle highlighted the growing popularity of blade systems. He said 40 percent of organisations have implemented or are implementing blade technology, and that blade systems make up as much as 25 percent of all servers in some firms.

Angle added that in-cabinet fluid cooled systems are gaining market acceptance and that the leading vendors such as Rittal, Sanmina and Liebert are moving to cabinet fluid systems if the heat load exceeds 10kW per cabinet. Angle also pointed to fluid cooled blade servers under development at HP and IBM.

Meanwhile, structured cable vendor Siemon's global network applications market manager Carrie Higbie advised firms to devise 10-year plans for cabling that mirror the average life of a datacentre. Higbie also pointed out that " flooding" – the practice of pulling extra cable and fibre into a datacentre without planning future network capacity – could affect air flow, be a fire hazard and also be expensive. "Some insurance companies require that extra cabling be removed," she added.