Minimising data centre cooling energy use

"Most data centre cooling systems are specified to ensure that the hottest racks in the facility have a sufficient cold air supply. This results in a large amount of energy being wasted as the entire facility is over-cooled to provide this legacy design capacity, said Soeren Brogaard Jensen, Vice President, Enterprise Software and Managed Services, Schneider Electric. “For the managers of these data centres, it is impossible to consider how to reduce the amount of cooling without introducing risk of thermal shutdowns because they lack the information to do so safely."

Data Center Operation: Cooling Optimize enables data centre managers to understand the complexity of airflow within their facilities, including all heat sources, cooling influences and dependencies. It is a closed-loop system, meaning that it learns from any actions such as inlet temperature adjustments, or equipment adds, moves and changes to the IT load, to keep the data centre cooling continuously optimized.

Once deployed, Cooling Optimize enables operators to monitor the real-time status of data centre health and determine the impact of any cooling event. This also enables situations such as overheating, hotspots and capacity issues to be predicted and avoided. By continuously analyzing use, future capacity requirements can be planned for, and stranded cooling capacity eliminated. Data Center Operation: Cooling Optimize automates a response to changes in the data centre environment to reduce hot spots - where load requirement exceeds cooling, and wasted energy - where cooling exceeds what is actually needed.

In a recent case study, the system was retrofitted by a large Pacific Telco provider to automatically measure, analyze and control cooling output to match the requirement of a dynamic data centre environment. Piloted in a single room, the user was able to turn off 13 CRAC units once installation and configuration was complete, saving 37% in average power use in the first year of operation. With the investment paid back, the customer is now rolling out Data Center Operation: Cooling Optimize throughout its data centre campus.

Soeren Jensen said, "Through the combination of retrofit software which learns intelligently, and wireless sensors in data centre racks, data centre managers can quickly start to confidently operate their legacy facilities closer to ASHRAE inlet temperature guidelines, without risk to availability and without any investment in existing cooling systems. In use, they can anticipate up 40% reduction in cooling costs."